Hull Damage

by Timothy J Meyer

  “Uh, Nemo...?” Odisseus coughs, as the Lover and her ten Wolfsbane torpedoes close to spitting distance to the Counterattack.

  “Well, you're shit outta luck today, bitches, because I'm Captain fucking Nemo and bloom me, is it getting hot in here or am I just blowing you the shit up!” he screams, a nanosecond before the vanguard torpedo makes first contact with the side of the Pylon.

  The effect is immediate and galaxy-encompassing. With no bombard shield to protect it, the Wolfsbane torpedo ignores any excuses to the contrary and soars straight up the Pylon's proverbial skirts to detonate clean against the naked hull. Having never actually seen a Wolfsbane torpedo fired in action before, Odisseus has little frame of reference, save one very unpleasant afternoon in the jungle, on what precisely to expect, but the ensuing explosion, compounded tenfold by the following nine torpedoes, certainly doesn't disappoint.

  It seems to the Ortok, in that breathless, harrowing moment before Nemo twists the yoke entirely to port and weasels mere inches past the outer edges of the chaos, that a significant portion of the Exacting Counterattack's port quarter has been instantaneously replaced by a blossoming flower of orange fire, big as life and rending to smote ruins anything unfortunate enough to be caught between. Hunks of blackened teltriton, contorted beyond recognition and still traced in burning doxychoraphum, shoot past the viewport at such incredible speed and frequency that Two-Bit's forced to raise their own bombard shields at maximum power to prevent being shredded to bits themselves. As Nemo slants the freighter on her invisible axis to prepare for the second run, Odisseus is equal parts thrilled and horrified to catch sight of the carnage in their wake.

  Through the haze of wreckage, igniting repellent and the silent screaming deaths of hundreds of crewmen, Odisseus can clearly discern the Exacting Counterattack in two separate and drastically disproportionate pieces, the area sundry to the prow ripping free of the Pylon's main body even as he watches. The last defiant strings of hull plating and power cable caught between wrench and snap loose, the pure dynamism of the explosion spinning the smaller section lazily away. The longer section, somewhat resembling a decapitated snake bleeding doxychoraphum and naval officers out its neck wound, reels somewhat, thruster failsafes engaging to absorb the brunt of the blow and maintain some shaky degree of frontal integrity. Odisseus exhales and shares an expression of mystified terror with Two-Bit at both their seemingly berserk Captain, the act of mass murder he just committed and its counterpart he was currently preparing. By all appearances, as appalling as it now appeared, their plan was somewhat successful, thus far, at least.

  Their progress flying far to the Counterattack's port goes entirely uncontested by the broadside batteries, understandably preoccupied by the small problem of the front of their ship going 'boom'. “Danbonte?” Nemo calls into the receiver. “You ready for another?”

  “Uh, sure,” the somewhat-traumatized humanoid mumbles back. “Lemme just...”

  “You got maybe, twenty seconds?” Nemo estimates. He grinds the freighter into another nail-biting swerve to properly face the remaining two-thirds of the Exacting Counterattack and shoves more orders down the comm. “Marco! Feed me the rest of the fuel.”

  Odisseus fumbles for his comm. “Wait, Marco, maybe you should–”

  Before he can muster a proper objection, The Unconstant Lover stalls, churns her boosters a moment and belches forward again toward the lopsided figure of the headless Pylon. Struggling against the surplus G-force left behind by the lax inertial dampener, Odisseus leans as close to the helmsmen's chair as he physically can, to shout over the sound of the blasting boosters. “Nemo? Did we forget about landing again?”

  Nemo's reply, partially muffled by the sound of Danbonte firing the eleventh through twentieth Wolfsbane torpedoes, hardly serves to comfort Odisseus' compounding concerns. “Oh. Landing. Right.”

  Odisseus jabs a finger directly at him. “Exactly. How do you propose we do that with no fuel?”

  This Nemo seems to ruminate over a moment, zoning distractedly out towards a nearby blank panel on the dashboard as The Unconstant Lover and her ten-torpedo-long lance of soon-to-be-exploding doxychoraphum charge once more unto the breach. At the last moment, mere seconds before the first torpedo's impact, he spares a glance back to Odisseus, seemingly to tender a theory. “Do you think we could–”

  “Nemo!” Two-Bit howls as the first Wolfsbane ruptures into the pertinent patch of the Pylon's exposed hull and all the viewport is painted flagrant orange.

  Years later, Odisseus, nor any crewmember aboard, could never quite be called upon to reliably explain or depict precisely what next happened. Beyond the pervasive and unmitigated orange that seemed to burn itself into his eyeballs, Odisseus would dimly recall a dreadful shake and rattle such as the Lover had never experienced. A recurrent rain of shorn teltriton shards, odd and ends literally thrown into the lurch and corpses, half on fire, the other half frozen, were fleetingly visible in the Ortok's memory, as well as the nebulous sensation of two massive metallic hulks, cross-sectioned like a schematic, drifting apart on either side of the viewport, their individual borders traced in vibrant, glowing doxychoraphum.

  The next sensation Odisseus is keenly aware of involves the rapidly growing shape of Baz's blanched ball, the terrified whining of all the dashboard's emergency alerts and, most saliently, the distant sound of both of The Unconstant Lover's jetboosters stuttering independently once or twice, wheezing an impressive quantity of exhaust and, apparently deciding to simply call it a day at that, both dropping dead in complete unison.

  Fifth Interlude

  Two-Bit Switch had a secret weapon. In his considered opinion, there was no better circumstance under which to negotiate a standing contract with a potential business partner than that potential business partner's potential drunkenness. To Two-Bit's specific knowledge, there was no faster, cheaper or more efficient way to ensure the level of wretched, ruthless, balls-to-the-wall intoxication that he preferred for such circumstances as that sordid chemical nightmare known only as the Bile Backwash.

  A station-wide oddity and the signature drink of Takioro's dirtiest tavern, the Bile Backwash, according to local legend, had first been spawned during an especially happy hour in The Bloody Afterburn, uncounted years before Two-Bit's time. In order to service the thirsts of his clamoring patronage, antediluvian bartender Roger, yet to be deemed Unhappy, had apparently been forced to combine the disparate dregs of several dozen some remnant boozes into the single hodgiest-podge of a slipshod grog imaginable.

  The validity of this tale Two-Bit certainly couldn't attest to, but whatever the case may be, the Bile Backwash had established a well-earned reputation as the single hardest drink in station, a cruel joke to play on tourists, some weapon of high-octane chemical warfare and the ace up Two-Bit's sleeve when it came to the negotiation of freelance crime.

  By way of example, the trick had worked famously with Nabdres No-Cock. While, to be fair, that partnership had so recently ended with harsh words and four canisters delivered to Two-Bit's lower extremities, he remained hopeful that this new potential client would be as susceptible to the Backwash's charms as the old Diraaqi had been.

  Come to think of it, his most recent business meeting to date, the one his potential client had so thoughtfully flown him to distant Laerto for, might possibly have gone Two-Bit's way, if only he'd had the foresight to bottle a little Backwash to ply his promising patron with.

  Unhappy Roger, whose continued existence was attributable only to divine intervention by the patron saint of old farts, had placed a quartet of the frothing, poisonous bastards atop Two-Bit's table at arm's length and with nothing more than a melancholy grumble for a further comment. Two of his prospective clients, oblivious to their incipient liver damage, had pawed up their respective tankards with matching eagerness and suspicion, though the third client had altogether neglected to move a muscle toward the offered alcohol.

  As encouragement, Two-Bit Switch offered hi
s favorite toast: “to taking what don't belong to you.” This latest mug represented the fifteenth or sixteenth such helping of the pungent mess he'd ever imbibed and subsequently, he favored his chances on coming out the other side with his metabolism more or less intact, a decision he immediately regretted upon allowing the vile fluid to touch his lips.

  Had he performed fellatio on an exhaust vent, Two-Bit couldn't imagine the sensation would be quite so unpleasant as this sudden reminder of the Backwash's dreadful potency. Certainly intending to cause further mayhem in the following minutes and hours, the cocktail immediately set about dissolving his teeth into a paste and sludging its way unbidden down his throat.

  To say Two-Bit coughed or cleared his throat afterwards would be a laughable understatement, as he endeavored to hack the revolting swill and the majority of his innards with it back into the steaming depths of his ale-jack, a sentiment clearly shared by his drinking mates.

  Nemo, the one Two-Bit assumed to be the leader, a black-haired humanoid only remarkable for his capacity to cram that much mischief into his smile, reeled backward in his chair as though shot and actually managed to wrestle out a curse as the alcohol had its heinous way with his mouth. “Oh, tie my balls to the fuselage and keelhaul me all the way to Spithax!”

  “Moons,” Two-Bit shivered after the swallow, “I always blank on how painful that actually is.”

  Directly across the table, Odisseus, the one Two-Bit assumed to be the bodyguard, a three-hundred pound behemoth of shaggy brown fur and distrustful glowers, practically hyperventilated himself with his frantic sniffing and tossing of his head, repeatedly batting at his nose with the massive paw unoccupied by holding the tankard. He snarled something unintelligible, though Two-Bit was unclear whether it was some bestial tongue he simply didn't understand or merely a sound of animalistic protest.

  The Captain commiserated emphatically. “I know! I can't feel my tongue!”

  “Oh, that'll hoof it in a few hours. You don't wanna hink about that.”

  “You wanna worry about the hangover.” To his right, Quicksilver, the one Two-Bit assumes to be the hard case, folded her arms sourly, her own flagon undisturbed at the center of the table. There was something quite decidedly wrong with this one, he resolved, something that made the greasy hair on the back of his neck stand on their greasy ends.

  Her all but shaved head did its level best not to advertise the color of her hair, which Two-Bit determined to be brunette after some scrutiny. The drab green of her eyes, the well-toned shoulder muscles suggesting an athlete's arms and the pair of obsessively-polished AccCo six-shooters strapped beneath and coincidentally to either side of a nonexistent rack all contributed to shriveling any lewd thoughts Two-Bit might have harbored into nothing.

  The one called Odisseus growled something at her yet still indiscernible to Two-Bit, to which she spared her own brew a cursory glance. “It smells like piss and malaria.”

  “Bloom me out, Two-Bit,” the one called Nemo remarked. “How do you even stomach this shit? On a regular basis?”

  “Bruno your way past the gag reflex,” Two-Bit advised with a nauseated burp, “and you'll be all drongo.”

  “Appetizing,” the one called Quicksilver commented. “Listen, can we cut to the chase here, what was it, 'Two' something?”

  “Two-Bit. Switch.”

  She scowled deeper. “The hell does that mean?”

  “Well, you fess me what Quicksilver is supposed to mean, maybe I'll do samewise.” The combined chuckling of Nemo and his big hairy friend clearly scored Two-Bit a few valuable points and he situated himself a little straighter in his chair. “But fair enough, tart – gimme a mite here for me thinkbox to nix melting out me ears and I'll sit right up and pay attention.” This Quicksilver character certainly had no taste for backtalk, Two-Bit clearly observes, but to judge from the churlish way she settled further back in her own chair, it was clear she'd dealt with more than her fair share as of late.

  Two-Bit seized this window to snatch up his discarded copy of this week's Bargain Bonanza, a flimsy catalogue of coupons and clearances scattered across Takioro's three floors every few days by desperate businessmen, planted both sneakers in typical crossed fashion on the edge of the table top and cued Nemo with an idle wave. “So, what seems to be the flaster and how much you willing to score old nuncle Two-Bit to fangle you out of it?”

  Nemo contemplated another sip of the Backwash, thought better of it and dropped both elbows to the scummy table. “Well, we've come into a situation. A situation, as it happens, with a particular prison.”

  “Heh. Bad luck. What happened?”

  “Gunboats,” Nemo grit his jaw in remembrance. “It's a long story. Suffice to say, whilst pulling a stash-and-blast on Nos Mantri, a rather important fixture among my crew got pinched by the law and it's my intention to spring him.”

  Two-Bit carefully concealed the smirk behind his catalogue. “Taardia or Nemen Uil?”

  “Hm?”

  “If he was still caffled on Nos Mantri, you wouldn't be chugging for a slambreaker, now would you? You'd unclink him yourself. But, if you came vizzing for Two-Bit Switch, he's someplace a lot fucking dodgier than all that and the only two blockhouses within lagging distance from Mantri are Taardia and Nemen Uil. So, which is?”

  Nemo rubbed his mouth with four fingers of his left hand before answering, as if embarrassed to make with the skinny. “Nemen Uil?”

  Two-Bit chuckled with impression, cracking the periodical once. “Your boy's got himself a bit of a sheet, don't he? Ain't never had the straws to unlag somebody outta Nemen Uil.”

  “Then what're we doing here?” Quicksilver appealed bluntly.

  Two-Bit peeled his Bonanza fully down. “Fuck me, aren't you just a merry-go-round of sunshine-and-butterflies?”

  Odisseus made some brief optimistic comment to Nemo, which Moira countered with a grave, “You're on thin fucking ice.”

  “Much as I hate to admit it,” Nemo confided to Two-Bit, “she might have a point. This ain't outta your league, is it?”

  Two-Bit replaced the catalogue. “Ball it up for me – you bring me mathematicals on any blooming clinker still standing in this bad old galaxy and I'll find you a way in, a way out and whatever leftovers they got in the chiller.”

  Nemo favored the jailbreaker with another smile too wicked to be true. “Glad to hear it.”

  “Now, before we go any further, we gotta jab a minute about the sweets. My, uh, consultation, you know, don't come buckshee or nothing,” he disillusioned, “and the rhino's gonna get a good deal more fat you looking for my participation.”

  “We're a little short-handed,” Nemo confessed, “so I'm thinking that's on the menu.”

  “Fair enough. What're you prepped to offer?”

  Nemo shrugged. “Well, what're your rates?”

  “Yogurt!” Two-Bit exclaimed, forgetting himself for a moment.

  All three gathered hoodlums enacted a triple-pronged scowl of confusion. “Excuse me?” Quicksilver was the first to clarify.

  Two-Bit slapped the Bargain Bonanza onto the table top to the immediate right of his since untouched Bile Backwash. “They don't hardly ever run vouches for yogurt,” he informed, indicating with a dirty fingernail. “Gimme a second here,” he requests, beginning the careful process of ripping the precious coupons free from the rest of the leaflet.

  “You eat yogurt?” Nemo scoffed.

  Two-Bit shrugged. “When they got vouches for it.”

  “Yeah, I don't know. I don't like the consistency. Don't you find that–”

  “Somebody shoot me already,” Quicksilver sighed.

  “Well, for Nemen Uil,” Two-Bit explicated as he cockled the catalogue's center page once, “scheming'd only chunk you back fifteen, but you want my personal wanks on this, you're vizzing at more like thirty-five.”

  Quicksilver snorted. “Nobody's 'personal wanks' is worth thirty-five, especially not yours.”

  “Good thing I ain't jabb
ing to you then, ain't it?”

  “Thirty-five's maybe a little high,” Nemo reasoned, reaching into the inside pocket of his jacket to withdraw a significant sheaf of cash as a sign of good faith, “but let's start with that consultation.”

  “Delighted. What're our goodies?”

  “You're looking at 'em,” Nemo concluded with an open gesture to suggest his two companions. “Four guns, one Briza, about a hundred thou and the three of us sorry blowbags.”

  “Well, you wanna go proper, you're gonna need blueprints, crusher patrols, time cards and daily schedules, prisoner transfer forms, schematics for necessary transports and detainment gantines – probably even a few low-level security digits or even keycards'd be better if you can fangle 'em.”

  Nemo sniggered nervously. “Uh, assuming we don't have any of those?”

  “Probably gonna get clinked yourselves, but,” Two-Bit canted his head aside, “lemme see what I can think up extemporaneous-like.” He finally freed the yogurt coupon from its waxen prison and held it up for closer inspection. “Briza, you jabbed?”

  “I did.”

  “Your best hazard then,” Two-Bit estimated behind the coupon, “is gonna be thumbing it up, unless you feel breezy blindfolding a heap like that.”

  “The whole ship?” Nemo grimaced with unconvinced calculation. “Uh, better not, especially with our technician behind bars.”

  “I'm not sure I follow,” Quicksilver weighed in. “Blindfolding?”

  “You take your gantine's sensors, see,” he demonstrated with a cupping gesture of his right hand, “and you bumble 'em, maxed bassackwards right, so rather than your peeps vizzing outwise, they're dusting your tracks. Sure, you ain't exactly starsy like that, but that way, any fuzz comes snuffing, ain't nobody but nothing where you oughta be.”