As she does this and reaches no valid conclusion, she almost fails to notice the emergence of three additional figures, hanging a considerable distance back, made extremely indistinct by the blizzard blaring between them and hefting what she dubiously identifies as massive, shoulder-mounted personal artillery, each one pointed more or less in her direction. Her adversary, regrouping a dozen feet away, pays these newest entrants no heed, suggesting them to be his accomplices and yet further threats she'll have to neutralize should she even survive this encounter with this tall, dark and scary stranger.
She remains bemused as to why, if they have her so exhaustively covered, they don't simply open fire and smear her across the snow. Whatever this one-on-one combat is meant to signify, it's a ritual she, in her current state, doesn't have the wherewithal to decode.
Long before she's ready for him, her opponent rushes her, winding the polearm back for a strike with all his considerable upper body strength behind it. She rises to a full kneel, preparing to dodge left and gamble at sinking her knife in her preciously scored wound on his midsection. He feints like a master, however, faking the two-handed swing to instead feed her a mouthful of haft.
Moira feels at least one tooth crack before she hits the ground. She manages to spew one such shard from her mouth before she sees him, her incipient murderer, standing proud in a pose of mastership and dominion that's vaguely familiar somewhere in the cluttered backroom of her brain.
Moira paradoxically wonders if she'll die by exsanguination, like Heeko before her, as her foe one-handedly hoists the harpoon high over his head, like vo Obxo before him, and is subsequently shot in the head for his trouble.
Craning her neck quizzically off the snow to see whatever newest craziness has reared its head now, she's forced to admit to herself that she's maybe almost relieved to see Nemo. He stands at vision's edge, goggles drooping around his neck and smoking snub of his Carbon Industrial piece guiltily pointed toward the smoking hole in her would-be-murderer's head, as if meekly admitting to its own handiwork.
Moira's statuesque attacker teeters once and topples like a tower into an adjacent drift, the weapon slipping from his lifeless hands and sinking into the snow. His thermal mask, its clasp shattered by Nemo's one-in-a-million shot, lolls off his dead skull, revealing a deathly and triangular face that Moira recognizes as painfully familiar and yet somehow still elusive.
Nemo practically skids forward, pistol completely extended and loosing three, four, five more canisters into the quite obviously dead corpse, expression of horrified glee slowly dawning on his face. Stranger still, none of the three lurking gunmen paint Nemo to the ground under fire, flee or even move a muscle.
“He's dead, Nemo,” Moira croaks at last, wary eye on the unrevealed enemies.
“He's Quuilar Noxix, Moira,” Nemo returns with as toothy a smile as ever she's seen.
“What?”
As if only suddenly noticing them, Nemo snaps his firearm to the nearest of the three gunmen and plants a round into his chest to a surprised squeal. A hasty word of warning from the second and still no return fire as Nemo clips his shoulder and buries a solid shot in his abdomen. The third drops his weapon and bolts eastward with all speed. It costs Nemo three canisters and a steadied gun arm to succinctly conclude their final fleeing foe, after which he contentedly drops his pistol and strides apart, both hands raised as though in mock-powerlessness. “That's it. It's official. I'm the best.”
Moira squints. “Nemo. Would you please fucking explain what in all the buttfucking moons of Jotor is the fuck going on here?”
Nemo marches proudly over the familiar corpse, whose brains discolor the snow, and peels him off the ground by the cuff, where he hangs comically off Nemo's fist. “You don't recognize Quuilar Noxix, ace bounty hunter, holovision star and card-carrying badass?” He heedlessly drops the body with a sickening squish and prances with immense pleasure toward the second nearest dead body, a humanoid female lying beside her bulky, discarded weapon. “I mean, a mysterious harpoon comes flying out of nowhere to snag ya and you don't immediately suspect Noxix? Come on.”
Moira squints harder at the half-headless face, already accruing considerable snow cover, and everything immediately clicks into place.
An inexplicable ambush at an extremely inopportune moment, the towering golem obviously a Yheum in a retrospect unclouded by fear and pain, the strange, showmanship-style markings on the harpoon; she was almost embarrassed. She props herself onto an elbow, finally engages in a thorough examination of the skewer protruding from the meat of her calf and is unsurprised to discover a tiny recording device cleverly mounted atop it. “You're not kidding. This is Quuilar Noxix.”
“Of course I'm not kidding,” Nemo snorts, stooping over the body of the distant humanoid to examine her equipment. “Our price is right enough, isn't it?”
“And he's practically Huong Xo's lapdog,” Moira corroborates. “How'd he get out here? Through that blockade?”
Nemo shrugs, fiddling with the dropped device. “He's Quuilar Noxix.”
“Fair.” She adjusts her weight to better see. “Is that–”
“You bet it is,” Nemo confirms, spinning about on his haunches with an expensive hunk of machinery Moira'd assumed to be weaponry and now blearily identifies as a high-end holocorder, of a brand and model tens of thousands of credits too ritzy for private citizens. “They recorded the whole thing,” Nemo realizes with a deepening of his already fathomless smile.
Moira can't help but join him and grin. “Fuck me. So, what does all this mean?”
“This means I've got the hardest cock in the galaxy. This means all bounty hunters will know my name and fear. This means I shot Quuilar Noxix in the head and have proof.”
“And the arm and the pelvis and the thigh.”
“Well, yeah,” Nemo concedes condescendingly. “I've seen Season Six, okay? I'm not falling for that.”
“None of which matters,” Moira's keen to point out, “if we freeze to death out here.”
“It also means,” Nemo continues, a fresh zeal catching fire in his eyes as he rises from his squat, corder entirely forgotten, and jogs hastily to the Yheum legend's messy remains. After rifling through his pockets for several long seconds and turning up a fair sheaf of cash and a handful of grisly trophies, he finally closes his fist around whatever he sought and wrestles it free of the dead bounty hunter's pockets.
Nemo unfolds the creased leaflet with growing excitement; Moira only groans and reaches from the discarded pile of cash and tribal fetishes. The paper's identity as a wanted poster is painfully visible through the sunlight peaking over Nemo's shoulder. Reading rapidly, his smile wilts almost as quickly.
“Okay, that's just uncanny. I do not know where they took this picture.”
Picking listlessly through the contents of Quuilar Noxix's pockets, Moira uncovers a key ring, outfitted with several more dangling teeth, a smattering of various ignition keys and a thumb-sized gray wad of metal that appears to be a remote starter.
They exchange glances. “You don't think...?”
After snatching it from her palm, Nemo presses the central call button to no immediate avail. He swings about, clicking the button in all directions until, a small distance to the east, a muffled motor revs hopefully and two pinpricks of light poke holes in the white smother.
“Can you walk?”
“Not so much,” she admits. “I don't know if you noticed, exactly, but our friend here shot me in the leg with a blooming harpoon gun.”
Nemo snaps once in satisfaction. “I can't wait to watch that footage.”
Moira also isn't ecstatic about leaning against him for support while they investigate their possible escape from the snowy hell of Baz's northern pole, but Nemo offers no complaint and she decides to count her blessings. As predicted, no more than two hundred feet eastward, with the help of Odisseus' imaging goggles, they uncover, cunningly disguised beneath a computerized camouflaging tarp, a scuffed, battle-scar
red and intergalactically famous driftscull, “The Wendengo” painted crossways on its fuselage.
They stand silently in the driving snow a second, with four corpses, among them the galaxy's most feared bounty hunter, a pile of salvaged camera equipment and a crashed space ship behind them, with a soon-to-be-commandeered drift vehicle, a direct route to Ott's hidden palace and an astronomically large pile of money awaiting them when they arrive.
With both bum ankle and speartip still jutting from her lower leg, Moira turns to Nemo and tilts her head. “Shotgun.”
Chapter 25
Odisseus would be the first to admit that, in the grand scheme of the crash, the negative flux coupling didn't feature too impressively high on the list of busts, breaches and major points of breakage that required his immediate attention. It did, however, excel in the department of “things Odisseus actually knew how to fix.” For this reason and this reason alone does he choose to devote the next several minutes to its repair, rather than the innumerable multitude of more pressing problems that featured in that somewhat different department, the esteemed “things Odisseus had no idea how to even begin fixing in the first place.”
In fact, the negative flux coupling's main “problem” honestly only required a few minutes work with his handheld torquer, work that had thus far taken Odisseus fourteen minutes and counting to satisfyingly complete less than half of.
In his defense, he's perhaps distracted by the tragicomedy of Ott's “ace mechanic,” a pseudo-professional, low-riding, Swumese chopshop grease monkey with the exact demeanor of every talentless incompetent Odisseus has ever had the displeasure of sharing a garage with. The Swum and his circus of lackwits lock graviton clamps into place all along the damaged hull of the bruised and battered Briza, in preparation for air-lifting The Unconstant Lover out of its slushy sinkhole via a magnetic driftcrane.
“You know,” Marco, shivering to Odisseus' immediate left, mentions, as though the Ortok was truly of a mind to listen to further advice from amateur repairmen, “you actually probably want new rivets in there, as opposed to just torquing the old ones back in place. 'S safer, probably.”
“Ortok's a mite ornery, boy,” Abraham, unaffected to Odisseus' immediate right, warns, with an apparently honest desire to see no one mauled this morning. “Mayhaps ye might wanna leave Odi be.”
Odisseus demurs moodily at last. “We don't have any new rivets.”
The tundra dawn is a muted, unremarkable thing – little more than the vague implication of the sun, a hazy pink glow, discoloring the eastern horizon. Most of the nearby illumination comes from work lights, installed at a perimeter of posts around the crash site and the cluster of headlights bristling from the bracing arm of the driftcrane, lending the entire area the faint appearance of a crime scene.
The three of them, what passed for The Unconstant Lover's crack repair squad, stand apart in a neat little procession a sizable distance from her starboard side, knee-deep in the swirling snow drifts, watching Boss Ott's wrecking crew attempt a less-than-convincing impression of a craft recovery team.
Last night's doozy of a blizzard had only slackened two hours before dawn and in its wake came the proverbial cavalry, as uninspired as a drove of neticgrappler-wielding ass-scratchers could potentially look. They galloped up with the dawn; a trio of slaved CC76 heavy ground haulers, the aforementioned driftcrane and the restless escort of Mutha Be Mean, currently ranging farther afield in search of any Counterattack survivors to gun down.
On the whole, Boss Ott's extraction crew left Odisseus with a tangible unease and the unflagging notion that they were little more than a trumped-up salvage crew who were entirely unaccustomed to recovering ships actually still in one piece.
The head oaf, this brainless Swum with a visibly lax methodology as regards starship repair, had received a thorough interrogation upon arrival, courtesy of one particularly overwrought Ortok. While the Swum's answers had proved obtuse and unhelpful at best, Odisseus had at least been able to draw something of a sketch of the previous evening's events, enough to mollify him until their return to Ott's fortress this evening.
From what admittedly little this knuckledragger knew, Nemo and Moira had reached their destination around nightfall aboard some vehicle the Swum couldn't positively identify but, to judge from his description, was either a driftsled, a driftscull or a narrowdrifter, with a handful of non-lethal injuries and claims about being waylaid by some bounty hunter while en route.
This knowledge attained, Odisseus could officially shift the focus of his hemming, hawing and hand wringing from his prodigal saltbrother's fate to the inevitable bungling of The Unconstant Lover's recovery by this addlebrained pack of corner-cutters.
“If ye don't mind me askin',” Abraham prefaces, for once not shirtless and sporting instead one of the Lover's emergency survival jackets unzippered over his blubbery bulk as an affectation or pretense more than anything else, “where do ye figure ye'll start?”
Odisseus torques with slightly more muscle. “I guess the steering column got cracked?”
Marco winces. “Ouch.”
“Yeah. So, that'll have to be top priority. Test flights'll be impossible without an intact steering column. Beyond that, though,” Odisseus allows, “there was surprisingly little actual structural damage. Barring certain, uh, sections of the undercarriage,” he circumvents, “she didn't break any really major bones. The skeleton is more or less undamaged.”
Abraham crosses his arms. “But?”
“But,” Odisseus repeats, “that doesn't mean we don't have weeks and weeks of work to look forward to.”
Marco sniffs and shifts his weight. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I mean,” Odisseus reiterates, tweaking the relevant rivet on the coupling that much harder, “there's everything else. Whenever something of this nature happens, some sort of shipborne calamity, especially a crash like this, it more or less behooves you to check everything – all the tiny modular systems, all the nooks, all the crannies, everything.” He ceases his work a moment to gesture aside with the torquer grasped in his left paw. “There's never any way to extrapolate all the latent effects of something like this, you know, on all the mechanisms and all the little systems and the stuff you take for granted. It's as good an excuse as any for a totally comprehensive re-haul.”
Some distance before them, the chains securing the graviton clamps to the driftcrane snap taut and ponderously, with a great groan of teltriton protest, The Unconstant Lover embarks on its shaky, unstable flight from the crash's impact zone to the awaiting train of cargo haulers. Watching with bated breath, Odisseus is palingly reminded of an invalid settling into a wheelchair for the first time until the graviton clamp securing the starboard bow fizzes once and promptly deactivates.
The entire freighter heaves hard to the side, the starboard bow nearly scraping the ground, but the remaining seven graviton clamps hold true, keeping the Lover aloft for the moment. Biting back an outraged roar behind fangs capable of ripping out ever so many rinky-dink mechanic throats, Odisseus instead wrenches the coupling's current rivet with enough force to twist and jam it inside its hole indefinitely.
“Did we ever actually ascertain what 'twas went wrong?” Abraham seems to realize at once.
“Boosters just overheated,” Marco supplies past Odisseus.
“No,” he corrects, torquing still harder and swallowing a sigh, “they didn't just overheat. I've been down there – those scorch marks you're seeing, the ones on the insides of the booster? That's not regular heat scoring.”
“Then what?” Marco challenges with an open paw.
“Doxychoraphum.”
Abraham scowls. “Really? How?”
Odisseus shrugs his massive shoulders. “I'm a little fuzzy on details, but I imagine the exterior cooling vents musta swallowed some on our way through the Pylon.”
“A lot?” Abraham clarifies.
“Not as far as I can tell, but it doesn't really take much – the boost
ers are damaged, certainly, but they're not destroyed.” Odisseus tilts his head aside as he concedes. “A good deal of the interior parts are pretty near destroyed, but, all in all, we're not looking at replacing them. As a whole.”
“...could we?” Marco proposes offhandedly after a moment.
Odisseus halts torquing the latest rivet, inhales a long, low breath and turns a glower individually crafted for Marco and this very specific question to his left. “What?”
Oblivious, the Mruka waves a paw in the general direction of the pendant Lover. “The jetboosters. How much does Nemo even know about them?”
“Little enough,” Abraham admits, “but I don't think ye–”
“You're suggesting we,” Odisseus conjectures with mounting intensity, “in lieu of actually fixing the problem, tell Nemo that both jetboosters were irrevocably damaged in the crash or the explosion or whatever our story is, trash these two warhorses that literally carried us through that shitstorm back there and instead, what, replace them with a bar engine?” He's snarling invective faster and nastier now, tiny droplets of spittle collecting at the corners of his muzzle. “Some glossy, underperforming piece of Terro Fleet Systems buhoxshit? Or, wait, maybe you meant a Concord Ind. N-Type 619 Thruster Package, so we can overtax the propulsion mainframe's contractors and flood the engine room with carbon fuel? Maybe a nice pair of Vbeck & Rhissol KX9s? You wanna talk about overheating boosters, there you fucking go. Well? Which was it?”
Marco stares dumbly into the snow between his feet as Odisseus finishes his fuming, still clutching the torquer and coupling in opposite trembling paws at his side.
“I think what Odisseus was maybe tryin' to say,” Abraham interjects after a weighty pause, “was that it weren't the ship's fault we crashed.”
“What Odisseus was trying to say,” Odisseus concludes huffily, adjusting his attention back toward the coupling, “was that you took an oath, Marco. I suggest you keep it.”
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