Hull Damage

by Timothy J Meyer

  Quicksilver blinked. “That was supposed to be an explanation?”

  Odisseus tossed a question in Two-Bit's direction, who passed a bemused expression onto Nemo. “He wants to know what you have in mind instead,” Nemo translated.

  “Thumbing up,” he repeated, raising his own thumb in the intergalactic “hitchhiker” symbol. “As an untethered space station, creeping into the Maximum Security Imperium pen at Nemen Uil ain't gonna be as habby as one-two-three. Not like you can stroll through a couple hundred dottibles of open nebula in this Briza of yours.”

  “Which means?” Nemo pressed.

  “Unless my thinkbox is missing a few screwers, Nemen Uil ougta still be using those old pre-blooming-Imperium model W14 deep space barge buggers for prisoner transport. That you can probably advant, assuming, of course, you can find your merry ways onto a touchdown pad.”

  “What, stowing away?”

  Two-Bit canted his head in the opposite direction. “Ain't got mucha choice, I'm afraid. Luckily, these W14 fuckers had some gashouse crunches with engine overheating and therefore, had these wanky little exhaust vents, situated right along the underchambers and even, as I recall, accessible from the blooming exterior of the gantine, assuming, of course, that soggy sod joying the bloody thing blanks on closin' 'em when he touches.” He shrugged with allowance. “It's jammed and sweaty as all the moons in there, but each one should be big enough to hold even your big hairy bruno here and only the hinkiest fuzz checks 'em.”

  “Then how do we get off?” Quicksilver demanded.

  “Well, I don't know about you, love, but I typically use a hanky and nudie ragger.” More chuckles, more scored points and Two-Bit craned forward, depositing both elbows on the table to better explain. “The missus ain't far wrong, though. Once you boost this blowbag from his box, thumbing back down ain't exactly an option. Gig'll be up faster'n you can jabb 'B&E' and your best hazard from there would probably just be deering the wankiest transport and hoofing it the bloom outta Jotor.”

  “That I'm fully capable of,” Nemo attested. “That's my specialty.” Odisseus intoned something both snide and gruff, which Nemo acknowledged with a point and no eye contact. “That too.”

  Two-Bit shifted the Backwash into his grasp, more out of habit than any desire to actually drink the thing. “Now, who exactly are you sticking your meat out for, if you don't mind me ringing?”

  “Grimalti fellow by the name of Abraham Bonaventure. You familiar?”

  “Bloom me out,” Two-Bit muttered. “I ord he was shipping out with an amateur crew, but I didn't...” Abraham Bonaventure had a harder reputation in Takioro than even the Bile Backwash. Rumor currently upheld that he'd taken to signing onto upstart pirate crews and working bilge jobs like sailing master or navigator. Had Bonaventure seen something in these rapscallions, perhaps this wasn't an opportunity Two-Bit could affordably pass up.

  The kind of corsair crew that Bonaventure endorsed might be exactly what the doctor ordered for his blossoming caper to end all capers, though Two-Bit would readily admit that, on first appearances, they didn't exactly look the part.

  Nemo splayed his hands in some manner of presentation of himself and his unimpressive compatriots, one still scratching Backwash out of his nose, the other moodily sulking like a petulant child trapped in the waiting room during her father's doctor's appointment.

  “Maybe,” Two-Bit reconsidered a moment, “if that horny bastard's on the line, we could biff that ride-along price down by say, ten or so?”

  Nemo sneered a sneer that Two-Bit would eventually regret agreeing to. “Twenty-five? Now we're talking.”

  “Oh, no,” Quicksilver murmured a moment later.

  “What now?” Nemo snapped.

  “There. At the bar.”

  Nemo matched her gaze. “Oh. Hm. Shit.”

  “What?” Two-Bit twisted his torso in the indicated direction.

  “Now, Moira,” Nemo began to chide.

  “I'll be good.”

  “Remember what happened last time you came here?”

  “Quite saliently,” she flatlined with an unflinching expression.

  The only fixture currently indulging The Bloody Afterburn's centrally-located bar that Two-Bit Switch could possibly have interpreted as noteworthy was the solitary spaceway robber relieving Unhappy Roger of three shots of his worst Gitterswitch. Two-Bit recognized the pissant little shit of a hired gun with delusions of adequacy and three-fourths of a Kelkian Battle Chassis on sight; he'd bought the armor ridiculously cheap off Eidesmoe because it was so drenched in the piss of its previous owner and no other customer would touch it.

  “What, Buckethead?” Two-Bit guessed, glancing back to Nemo and Quicksilver.

  “Switch?” Buckethead's voice called across the Afterburn. Caught-in-the-headlights disappointment was evident upon each of his client's faces. “Moira. Heh,” Buckethead leered after a beat. “Didn't know you still drank here.”

  “Don't try it, Buckethead,” Quicksilver warned, her vision planted firmly on the table.

  “Hey, Moira.”

  “Just don't, Buckethead.”

  “Moira.”

  “I swear to all the moons, Buckethead, if you–”

  “When you gonna roll over for me, Moira?”

  Two-Bit almost snickered but before he could open his mouth, Quicksilver was on her feet, both AccCo 665 Lawman revolvers glistening at the end of extended fists. “Bloom me out, Buckethead, I warned you–”

  With exactly no time to draw his own piece or even to duck to cover, Two-Bit Switch's very first bar fight with the crew of The Unconstant Lover began, Moira Quicksilver and Buckethead both drawing down and filling the Afterburn with the raucous shrieking and polychrome flashing of their individual laser weapons. Two-Bit managed to scamper off his chair, share a knowing glance with Nemo and Odisseus under the table and allow himself that denied snicker as Moira's tagged in the side by one of Buckethead's lucky shots.

  “Every blooming time!”

  Chapter 24

  Two-Bit Switch has never, for all his thirteen years of experience as a freelance tramper, survived a shipwreck. He'd only personally known a handful of lucky spacers who could make such a bold claim. Indeed, one Abraham Bonaventure was almost more famous for that than for anything else on the laundry list of his apparent exploits, but each and every one of those survivors had walked away a profoundly changed being, with whole bundles of deeply-ingrained neuroses and paranoias that haunted them for the rest of their fidgety lives. As far as Two-Bit understands the exact proportions of the pickle that he and the rest of The Unconstant Lover's crew had landed themselves in, this was the absolute best-case scenario.

  “Two-Bit!”

  The cry comes as if from a great distance or underwater.

  “Two-Bit!”

  Suddenly, something shakes Two-Bit Switch. He's immediately back, strapped firmly into the shield station's gyroscopic rig, co-pilot to the shouting Captain Nemo and staring down the barrel of Baz, a stark white globe whose curvature is only faintly visible at the outermost edges of the viewport. It all returns instantly following, as if suctioned back into his brain – the terrible jouncing and tossing of the helm, “FATAL ENGINE FAILURE” lionized across the dashboard's thousand alerts, repeatedly frightened cursing in Ortoki somewhere behind him and, to his right as ever, the hollered commands of his Captain.

  “Two-Bit! The bombard shields!” On instinct, he reaches out and grabs the console the gyroscopic rig dangles before him with trembling hands that barely remember its function.

  “Where?” he finds himself asking.

  “We're heading into atmo, Two-Bit,” Nemo reports, not unpanderingly, “so, the front and, uh,” he adds, eyes flicking out the viewport, “probably the bottom.” Two-Bit complies, muscle memory aiding him to puzzle out the suddenly confounding mechanics of the shield station. All the while, his attention is firmly focused following Nemo's previous gaze; out the window.

  The first traces
of the aerodynamic heat, manifesting as fire duller, more natural and yet no less deadly than the astringent orange of doxychoraphum, begins to play along the contour lines and bracing arms of the viewport, a haunting overture for the flames that will soon engulf the entire front section of the ship.

  Whether Nemo had somehow managed to dodge the incoming Pylon and subsequent explosion of Wolfsbane torpedoes or whether they'd actually soared relatively clean through the gaping hole those torpedoes had torn, Two-Bit couldn't rightly recall, for all the residual orange burnt behind his eyelids. Whatever the case might have been, both the jetboosters had evidently been knocked cold by the blast. While they'd since lost considerable thrust in the seconds between, the leftover momentum from Nemo's initial headlong charge had been precisely enough to nudge them neatly into Baz's gravity well. Now, seemingly out of control, The Unconstant Lover plummets headfirst toward the planet's northern pole on her rollicking ride to ruin.

  All around Two-Bit, the helm is in a state of civil unrest. Alarms wail, cabinets flap, teltriton groans, bottles break, lights falter, garbage flies and all three of its occupants grasp for any possible means to combat their inevitable destruction, with no time to bite nails or wet pants. Two-Bit completes the preliminary shielding procedure and takes a modicum of comfort from the knowledge that the rippling waves of heat are held at bay, if only for a few moments.

  Likewise helpless, Nemo locks antlers with the unresponsive yoke. “Nothing – I've got nothing. With boosters gone, I've got no handling, no steering, not a fucking thing.” He toggles a pair of green switches behind an open panel at the level of his knee. “What, auxiliary?”

  Odisseus is measurably less idle. Two-Bit watches, uncomprehending, as the massive Ortok, struggling to retain his footing on the fluctuating floor and with an ear to the teltriton of the helm's back wall, knocks every few inches with a furry fist, as though looking for something. He barks out an answer to Nemo's question and, compounded by the all-encompassing clamor and the Ortok's own frustration, the words sound even less like language to Two-Bit and more like strange animal noises.

  “...okay,” Nemo returns, obviously disconcerted by something. “So, a jump-start, then?”

  Odisseus returns more of a roar than a reply, a level of anger present in his voice Two-Bit cannot ever recall hearing.

  “Then what're you–”

  With a single syllable Two-Bit reasonably translates as “This,” Odisseus budges his claws beneath an oblong piece of plating and shoves outward, literally ripping the paneling clean off the wall and clattering it against the floor. Wasting no time, the Ortok seizes forth a two-foot long lever, rusted entirely brown and disused for decades, from the look of it. Piling all his tremendous weight atop it ratchets it fully perpendicular to the wall.

  Two-Bit immediately feels a dramatic deceleration of the Lover's plunge, as though Odisseus had somehow pulled a massive hand brake. From the corner of his eye, Two-Bit can spot, even from her dented nose, flaps, hatches and fulcrumed tabs now standing erect, jointly creating significant drag and lending the freighter the appearance of a spined brushvezzer.

  Upon seeing this, Nemo exchanges a dire look with his Ortok mechanic. “You really think?”

  Odisseus snarls an obvious affirmative between grunts of exertion.

  “What? He really thinks what?” Two-Bit suddenly attempts to desperately ascertain.

  With no further trace of insobriety and a celerity uncommon to him, the Captain Nemo yanks loose his headset, rams the meat of his palm into the general intercom's address button and rattles off a series of orders with more genuine fear than Odisseus' genuine anger. “All hands! All hands! Emergency stations! Make sure you're strapped down!” This achieved, both Nemo and Two-Bit share a second sidelong glance out the viewport. With white whipping clouds beyond both, an envelope of piggybacking flames is barely repulsed by the overtaxed bombard shields.

  “Cap'n, there's gotta be–”

  The faintest spark of inspiration, a glimmer of outrageous hope, enkindles in Nemo's gray eyes. “Driftjets,” he mutters, before tossing the chair fully around to face Odisseus. “The driftjets! We might not have engine power, but there's no reason the jets won't still fire!”

  “Those are only used for touching down,” Two-Bit objects. “They ain't gonna have enough oomph to nix a fall like this!” A little distracted by strangling the impressive kickback of the Lover's impromptu hand-brake into submission, Odisseus still voices an agreement to Two-Bit's reasoning.

  “If we shoot 'em at the right second, they'd cushion the crash,” Nemo theorizes ardently. “Fuck, they might even stop the crash, if we can time it out.”

  This course of action, a splinter of hope flimsy enough that even Nemo couldn't quite fathom its effectiveness, simultaneously strikes the three pirates as preferable to an unrestrained nose-dive from short orbit. They, as one, spring off about new duties.

  As Nemo fiddles with the ignition keypad and Two-Bit grapples with the buckles of his safety belts, he notices, apparently for the first time, the chatter warbling out of the internal comm. A cacophony of voices, originating from Danbonte, Abraham, Marco, Moira and Garrigan, all yammers into one patched, panicky mishmash.

  Once he's freed of his belted prison, Odisseus waves Two-Bit forcefully over to the lever and issues some command whose meaning he can well imagine.

  The lever to hold open all the Lover's dragging flaps, Two-Bit discovers, is excruciatingly heavy and requires an oppressive amount of strength to lock in place. He's about to call the Ortok back and plead inability, but the mechanic is immediately engaged in aiding Nemo with the driftjets and Two-Bit resolves himself around doing what little he can. The slightest slackening of his efforts could easily snap the lever back into its furrow in the wall, an eventually Two-Bit does his level best to prevent by practically folding his entire body over the rusty bar.

  As Nemo and Odisseus scramble about the helm, preparing to jury-rig a truncated and bastardized version of a landing sequence, Two-Bit, quivering from sheer strain, attempts to divert the sinking feeling of pending annihilation by listening to the din of frenzied intercom babble blaring from every available ship's speaker. A voice belonging to no one but Abraham chants, Danbonte whines nauseatedly from the belowdecks crawlspace, Marco screams for recognition in the engine room and some urgent back-and-forth conversation flies between Moira and Garrigan about legs and hands.

  Two-Bit's a second from shouting something to Nemo or Odisseus when his hand, slick from sweat, slips and the majority of his weight goes with it, toppling him off the yanked lever nanoseconds before its furious cracking back would have severed his arm.

  The Unconstant Lover teeters sickeningly forward in response to the flaps snapping shut. Their angle of attack toward the planet whets itself that much shearer and the vomiting gravity casts the Lover's crewmen about like dice in a jar.

  Two-Bit tumbles straight into the side of the navpanel like a clumsy acrobat, Odisseus is slapped into the co-pilot's gyroscopic rig with a whimper and the habitually unbuckled Nemo's thrown clear over the dashboard and into the viewport with enough rapidity to crack the glass.

  The immediate shift of pressure has more radical effects on the helm itself, however – if once it was at unrest, it now riots. The persistent rattling spikes tenfold in strength and speed. Internal screens and monitors splinter. Screws and rivets twist and contort. Deck, wall and ceiling plates buckle and pop out of place. The ship's very bones quake, threatening instant dismantlement.

  Out the cracked viewport, the ground is abruptly visible through a whiff of cloud fleeing The Unconstant Lover's apparently adamant header toward the planet below. Only white, speckled by the occasional patch of rock or water, can be determined on the surface, but no one cursed with such a view doubts they've any more than a minute to live.

  It costs Two-Bit the utter reserves of his strength to crawl up the mountainous incline of the helm's tilted deck, wrap both hands around the retreated lever and wr
ench with all his might. Despite his best efforts and the eventual extending of the freighter's exterior flaps and hatches, the plunge's angle is only scarcely adjusted to their favor. Try as he might, the fate of The Unconstant Lover and all her souls passes from Two-Bit's hands.

  In the half a second since his unscheduled flight, Odisseus has gathered Nemo by the scruff of his aviator's duster and thrown him with equal force back into his beloved pilot's seat. Understandably somewhat disoriented, the Captain, with vomit trickling down between clenched teeth, is only given the remainder of the second to gain his bearings, comprehend the inevitability at hand and act. With the hasty, glanced approval of both Two-Bit and Odisseus, Nemo, when faced with spectacle of solid ground racing toward himself and his doomed spaceship, jams the ignition button hard.

  The following second tries its damnedest to compensate for the events of all those previous. The Unconstant Lover seesaws uncontrollably, angle of axis flipping completely as rocket-powered lift erupts from the underside of the ship's bow. Two-Bit, Nemo and Odisseus are all temporarily weightless in the interim between paradigm shifts, each of their hair scarcely brushing the ceiling in the unexpected jump. After the squeal of protest from all things teltriton, the overwhelming howl of the driftjets pops and fizzes suddenly, leaving a breath of stomach-flipping silence broken only by a woman's scream.

  With a monumental splash of displaced snow, The Unconstant Lover, its hysterical descent curtailed only by the suicidal intervention of the burnt-out driftjets, freefalls a story and more to belly flop onto the surface of Baz's north pole with an atrocious chorus of rending, snapping, screeching and chewed metal. The impact bangs all three of the helmsmen hard against the ceiling, thoughtful enough to deposit them quickly back to the floor afterward. The once-orange viewport shatters and caves beneath an onslaught of powdered white.