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Moira's banged up her ankle. She imagines she should probably be thanking all the moons of Jotor that she miraculously wasn't more seriously injured in the crash. The collision with the ground launched her an effective fourteen feet in the air, from the near bottom of the underturret's access ladder up onto the floor of the gundeck proper.
She ought to be more grateful that when her ankle caught between the second and third of the ladder's rungs and she swung stupidly about to slam her back into the gundeck floor, only her ankle suffered the worst of the damage, as opposed to her fragile spine or still more fragile skull. On the other hand, the universe had just deemed it necessary to squash her best remaining friend into a fine paste, so, at this point, she's inclined to call it even.
The polar wind toys playfully with the folds of her poncho, but Moira's hardly in the mood. Her mighty jackboots stand as obelisks amid the snow shifting about her feet, carried forth by the same frisky wind Moira predicts also secrets a hidden blizzard somewhere past the horizon. She watches over the smoldering wreck of The Unconstant Lover, more specifically the pulverized ruins of the underturret, as a single dot of life amongst the immeasurable white waste in every direction. Had she not other very specific duties to perform, she would have volunteered to, in her current mood, stand vigil over his remains until the Endless Imperium came to end this world.
He'd been the crash's only casualty, through some freak of coincidence. Danbonte had managed to squirm his way from the torpedo chamber into the dubious safety of the gundeck itself while Marco'd strapped himself into the engine room's emergency seat at the first sign of trouble. As for the other officers, Abraham never left the sensor room and while the three in the helm were likely suffering some mild cranial trauma, they each appeared devoid of any serious injury, a fact Moira was privately dismayed to realize.
Only ex-Petty Officer Glive Garrigan, trapped in the forsaken underturret, hadn't been spared.
Long after the initial injury on his leg had superficially healed, he continued to show muted signs of impairment, despite his half-hearted attempts to disguise them and Moira's equally half-hearted attempts to ignore them. He'd rarely left ship at all over the past seven months and he sat or even lied down whenever either was available or socially acceptable. Most obviously, his efforts at climbing down the access ladder and into the underturret had never truly recovered and remained a clumsy, ungainly affair.
Over the alarms, sirens and other spiraling sounds of the crash, Moira couldn't hear his specific objection – whether his leg was stuck, had slipped or simply wasn't responding. Either way, he never reached for her extended hand, not until she was already flying and he was a second from obliteration.
A spurt of movement to her right and any lingering funeral thoughts are messily banished from her mind by that most intrusive sound of puking. Thirty-five some feet to her right, propping a forearm up against the half-sunken shell of the Lover to support himself, is Nemo, doubling partially over to paint the snow between his boots beige-and-blue with another throatful of vomit. He's lucky too, Moira ruminates grimly – it's a comparatively warm day on the pole, lest his largely liquid upchuck freeze before impact and shatter in his face. As she watches her Captain, callously losing his proverbial lunch of gin, gin and more gin not fifty feet from Garrigan's final resting place, she's starkly reminded that the universe itself, in all actuality, hadn't deemed that final belly flop necessary.
Someone else had.
She awaits him with perfect patience, fully equipped, provisioned and capable of departing off into the frozen wilderness with her next step, but indulging him his vomit, the consequences of his irresponsibility. A not-inconsiderable length of time later, he spits the final dregs into the pile of steaming, soon-to-be-frozen slush at his feet, wipes his mouth, predictably with the sleeve of his jacket, and approaches her.
“My head feels like people are fucking in it,” he moans when he closes to fifteen feet. He's attired warmly, as she is, though, in his case, it's less a matter of precaution and more of Odisseus' repeated insistence.
In place of her thick woolen poncho and skin-tight survival suit beneath, he wears one of the insulated and ribbed black leather winter coats from the Lover's emergency supply, a distant and hooded cousin to his typical aviator's jacket. Whereas Moira covers her exposed pate with a nondescript stocking cap and even bothered to include a kerchief tied around her neck to guard her lower face from the wind, Nemo can only be bothered to raise his fur-lined hood as well as, somewhat nonsensically, a pair of welder's goggles too massive to belong to anyone but Odisseus.
He must notice her split second's remonstrance as he budges them down over the bridge of his nose. “What?” He splays his hands out defensively, the enormous black orbs where his eyes once were lending him the unhappy comparison to a Spith spinner. “They're for locating electrical signals, alright? I borrowed 'em from Odi.” He finishes zipping his coat to his neck before he amends the statement. “Well, it'll be borrowed when he finds out.”
Moira sniffs and continues to refuse eye contact.
Stunningly, Nemo doesn't take the hint. “This is the part where you call me a colossal asshole, isn't it? This is the part where I'm a massive fucking douchebag and how dare I and all that, right?”
Moira sets her jaw firmer.
“Well, if you wanna know my opinion,” he stipulates, with no actual concern for the condition he's just set into place, “I think we came out alright. The ship's more or less in one piece, we're only a couple of mottibles from being rescued and I'd like to direct your attention to the other guy.” He makes a sweeping dramatic gesture past Moira's point of gaze, certainly to indicate the absence of the Exacting Counterattack in the overcast sky, though she doesn't avail him of this either.
She does, however, catch sight of the global intuiter's smallish antennae, bobbing out of his coat's left-hand pocket, reckon him ready to depart and stomp away north.
He dallies half a minute behind, buzzes his lips and follows.
The Little Beggarman absconded with and their only driftcart confiscated by Insurgent Company several thousand dottibles to the south, the lucky seven remaining members of The Unconstant Lover's crew had no vehicular transport to send north in search of rescue or Ott's fortress. Moira's inclusion in the foot patrol was a foregone conclusion, considering her experience as an overland tracker and the vast majority of the crew, save Odisseus, had been only too happy to send their untrustworthy wastrel of a Captain off into the polar wastes to die a cruel death by cold or predator.
Despite all his pleas to the contrary, Odisseus himself had been practically forbidden to accompany his “saltbrother,” as his technical expertise was desperately needed onboard to initiate repairs and, though no one dared say as much, convert the Lover's wreck into some kind of a shelter, should their first foray on foot not return.
When she'd initially volunteered, Moira'd been looking forward to a little quiet time in the singular company of Righty, Lefty and maybe the odd boot knife. She was, of course, less than ecstatic to suddenly have to share the journey with Garrigan's, however inadvertent, murderer. On further reflection, traveling alone into the tundra certainly wasn't the wisest tactic available to her either. Danbonte had refused her offer, Odisseus was barred from abandoning the ship and there was no one else among Two-Bit, Abraham or Marco that she'd have necessarily preferred over Nemo so she'd, however begrudgingly, given her consent.
The snow is waist high in places and Moira does what little she can to navigate around the deeper drifts and dunes that continue to crop up across whatever path she chooses to take. Their lackluster pace is less than half the rate she'd hoped to undertake, but factoring her bum ankle into account, she can't honestly press herself much faster without fear of compounding or complicating her injury.
Nemo, for his part, spends his time glued to the global intuiter, reminding Moira every few hundred feet which direction is north, a fact she's keenly aware
of without the aid of a bleating handheld device. While Baz's northern pole isn't actually an ice cap and is truthfully more of a continent with a solid bed of rock somewhere below them, Moira finds scarce trace of any mountain, hill or true topographical landmark during the entire seven mottible trek. Only shifting mounds of snow span effortlessly in all directions, like a desert bleached white.
The landmarks they do encounter, the ones Moira mentally denotes so as to mark their eventual progress back to the Lover, are universally wreckage. The majority of them are torn, twisted and submerged deep enough in the sea of snow that only their shadows are visible, blackness beneath a dusted membrane of white.
Every now and again, however, they'll encounter a more recognizable shape, protruding like scorched signposts on their road to nowhere. Sometimes, it's even discernible; two-thirds of a Spur, the blackened and blast-shorn hulk of a tugger that can only be the remains of The Business End, but more and more as they tromp further and further from the Lover's own ruin, they stumble across pieces of the Pylon.
As most of its smaller debris would have burnt to a crisp during atmospheric entry, what they happen upon are the larger chunks of the Exacting Counterattack, those few pieces substantial enough to survive the strain of the aerodynamic heat and thrown clear enough from the blast to land anywhere within sight of Moira and Nemo's route. Most of it is indistinguishable to Moira, all hunks of contorted and besmirched teltriton that perhaps Odisseus could identify on sight but look like nothing but wreckage to the otherwise naked eye. They pass at least one carcass, however, that Moira recognizes as a section of the attitude fin, complete with collapsed cross-section of decks and crowd of attendant corpses.
One survivor, crushed under a hunk of machinery and showing the beginnings of frostbite, even cries to what he must expect to be a mirage for mercy, but neither Nemo nor Moira stir their weapons from their holsters to oblige him.
Through the occasional break in the appropriately gloomy cloud cover, the flagship's final fate is fleetingly visible high in the troposphere. One third, either the prow or the midsection, is completely gone, certainly crashed to the planet someplace before the Lover did. Another third, again either the prow or the midsection, must be that meteoric ball of fire streaking westward toward the nearest ocean by the fastest means possible – down.
The final third, clearly the engine bank, has somehow managed to keep itself aloft by rotating fully on its axis and employing all its thrusters to effectively hover its way lower and lower into the atmosphere. Moira catches occasional glimpses of it, between passing sheets of cloud, and every time, it's worked its way closer to the surface. She momentarily wonders how it'll attempt to land.
She entirely loses sight of it as the blizzard rolls in. She'd foreseen it somewhat, brooding past the horizon when they'd first departed hours ago, but she, in retrospect, should have anticipated conditions this bad or worse on the north pole.
Visibility plummets to a handful of feet in any direction, Trudging several paces behind, Nemo becomes more of a blurred black notion than a corporeal being, and the wind howls with such vehemence that the global intuiter's incessant beeping struggles even to be heard. All landmarks and any real hope of finding their way back are summarily dashed by the whipping, whirlwind of white moving fast from the east with no obvious signs of relenting.
Yet for all the ferocity of wind and snow, what Moira simply couldn't have adequately prepared for, had she tried her absolute hardest, was the cold.
It's a unique brand of cold, entirely foreign to Moira who'd, over the years, grown accustomed to, if not necessarily comfortable with, the unfeeling chill of dead space. This terrestrial cold is malignant, resentful and harrows something deep in Moira's psyche as she continues to slog forward; the pervasive notion that, no matter her equipment or technology, humanoids were never meant to dwell in this place.
Fifteen minutes into the blizzard, her bones ache where they suddenly didn't before, the kerchief across her face has annealed hard as stone from frozen moisture escaping her mouth and she's laughably beyond the point of shivering. The wound on her neck flares in memory of another such hopeless march through this planet's wilderness barely a month previously when she hears something.
Far to her right, piercing the wind's boisterous opera is a note on a different key, not unlike a person's voice, but faint, strident, alien and screaming. She stops hard to listen and discovers, three steps behind, Nemo has similarly stopped and is casting glances about in every direction.
Moira withdraws the kerchief from her face with a crackle and opens her chapped lips for the first time in hours. “You hear it?”
Nemo musses up his face. “Hear what?” he shouts over the wind and its strange neighbor, before shoving a fingerless glove down the back of his trousers. “My ass itches.”
Not bothering to sigh or even roll her eyes, Moira brushes aside her poncho's folds and retrieves Righty and Lefty, the discordant sound rising in volume and therefore almost certainly in proximity at an alarming rate over the past moment. Before she's even a chance to spin and face the incoming noise, the screeching whoosh reaches its zenith and an incredibly piercing pain explodes from her right calf. Via some irresistible force, she is yanked, calf-first, into the blizzard with enough whiplash to drop both Righty and Lefty fruitlessly in the snow.
Moira slams her stomach to the ground several feet off and is evulsed away to an unknown fate exactly in time to hear Nemo breathe “Sweet fuck.”
As excruciating as the continued jolting pain in her left leg is, it doesn't take skidding and skimming across the snow backward on her stomach at top speed for terribly long for Moira to both feel a pang of belated sympathy for the late Ebeneezer and suss out that whatever so thoroughly wrecked her calf was almost certainly a hooked grapple on a line of some kind. A hasty glance over her shoulder confirms this, in the form of a wickedly notched skewer with a truncated haft, trailing a taut cord off into the hazy white nothingness some distance behind her.
In theory, all she needed to do was extract the emergency survival knife from her left boot, contort herself into some kind of Talosian pretzel wherein her blade could actually reach the cable dragging her away to doom and simply sever said cable before she reached whomever waited at rope's end, all while being trolled backwards across the tundra with a banged-up angle and a barbed speartip threatening to tear her calf to shreds with every bump and every bounce.
The knife riding in her left bootstrap is surprisingly difficult to extract, all things considered. After enough careful flailing, she's able to pinch the pommel between pointer and middle fingers and slide it succinctly from its holster, after nearly dropping the whole affair, boot and all, as she cleared a passing snowdrift. Boot knife achieved, she switches hands and, ever careful of its delicate placing in her lower leg, establishes a firm yet gentle grip on the skewer's shaft.
Arching both her knife arm and her spine, Moira holds her breath and slashes at the grappling line with the blade of her boot knife. She's rewarded with some purchase, a few of the cable's strands out of place, and the unwelcome but expected jostling of the barb from the impact's recoil. She bites back tears of bewilderment and strikes again, this time sentencing the cord to dangle by only a pair of resilient threads but again, further slicing into her much-abused leg. Moira allows herself an agonized cry as she nicks both remaining strings with the edge of her blade and is unceremoniously loosed from the reeling cord, flopping and tumbling into a heap of soreness, skewer and snow.
As was seemingly customary for this festering shitstorm of an afternoon, she's not given the pleasure of more than a minute to physically right herself, snap loose and consider the queerness of the skewer's haft, specifically scored to create that distinctive screaming sound when flying through the air, before he appears.
Like death's own visage, he materializes out of the depths of the whiteout.
Eight feet tall if he's an inch, chameleoned all in colorless camouflage and complete with adve
rse climate gear, matching thermal mask and offending, heavily-modified speargun slurping up her sundered rope, the pseudo-humanoid figure prowls outward from the blizzard's embrace on lanky shanks of a height with Moira's shoulders. He's terrifyingly silent as he stalks forward, each expansive stride congruent to three or four of Moira's own. She struggles to stand, knife clutched in her trembling grasp, to meet this strange, baffling attack before he could close the distance and finish her.
After seven mottibles of arctic trailblazing and her wild ride of the past forty seconds, however, Moira lacks anything resembling the necessary strength for a last stand. Her left leg, shooting veins of anguish all the way up into her torso, crumples beneath her and plops her back to the snow. To her calf's credit, the stumble causes her to unwittingly dodge her assailant's opening shot with the spear gun, the crazed and notched projectile quivering in the snow inches beyond her kneeling form.
With no disappointment or any other apparent emotion on that skull-like thermal mask, her inscrutable enemy frees a particularly nasty polearm from the speargun's racked arsenal and tosses the firearm aside like an unwanted toy. Complete with a spear-fighter's stance to shame and embarrass that Whuudi-wannabe bounty hunter Moira'd dispatched back on Takioro, he takes her two titanic steps forward, each step accompanied by a devilishly-aimed swipe of the polearm's cruel spearhead that Moira only rolls away from by sheer chance.
The third such swing she actually counters by rolling the opposite direction, slipping unbidden inside his weapon's impressive reach with another variant of the Wheeling Tvorka somersault, this version modified to conclude with a brutal sidelong kick to the kidney, which she succeeds with satisfying give. Her opponent strangles a gasp as the jagged point of the skewer, still rammed into her wounded calf, rends both the side of his insulated covering and the flesh beneath, dying the barb's tip an ashen gray.
Her opponent staggering several steps back, almost more in shock than pain, Moira wastes a moment thumbing through a mental index of potential antagonists at large with gray blood and fitting this rather peculiar description.
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