Hull Damage

by Timothy J Meyer

  “I ain't that stupid,” is Moira's delicately fashioned slice of truth to substitute her excuse. She delivers this behind the thinnest smirk, more or less exactly how she'd inwardly rehearsed over and over again on the seven-dottible march across Baz's northern pole.

  The entire gambit, the entire misdirection and all Moira's elaborate planning over the past three months hangs starkly in the balance. As the silence behind her endures nearly half a minute, Moira inches her forefinger into Lefty's trigger gap and makes mental peace with the idea of gunning the shadow in her doorway remorselessly down.

  “So?” he grunts and all that remains is to thread him onto the bait, sentencing her scapegoat to a fate she imagines he richly deserves.

  Moira's shrug barely upsets her shoulders, returning her left hand to the task of Righty's upkeep. “Who is?”

  The conclusion certainly isn't foregone on the one-way-track of his quietly vengeful mind, to judge from the process of elimination she can practically hear through his skull. After some seething deliberation, he arrives on the mark. “Danbonte.” The realization is cold condemnation.

  If Moira feels any lingering guilt or pity for her comrade thrown beneath the proverbial drifttrain, her demeanor hides it entirely. “Try not to make a mess,” she requests with a pinch of domestic weariness she deems appropriate for the circumstance.

  Confident in the apparent success of her long-winded deception, Moira collects up the bristled black chamber brush to clean out the first of Righty's six cylinders. She doesn't catch sight of the shadow pushing apart the left side of his duster and placing a hand atop the stock of his holstered pistol before she's far too late to retaliate. Caught unawares with a brush down the chamber of an unloaded pistol and Lefty effectively mottibles out of reach for all the good it could do her now, Moira's blood runs colder than the space just beyond her teltriton walls as he asks his final question.

  “You're not harboring anything on account of Garrigan,” he intones blackly, a statement, rather than a true question – rigid, unfeeling and devoid of interpretation.

  Never a celebrated liar the caliber of someone like Two-Bit, it costs Moira every last ounce of her composure to sneer, moments later, “If I had, I would have killed you.”

  Something about this answer, be it the pluck, the defiance or simply its sheer logic, strikes enough of a chord within him to vanish the shadow, after four excruciating seconds, from her doorway and down the corridor with the determined footfalls of a man about to commit a crime of passion.

  With only the familiar yellow rectangle behind her, Moira exhales and hastily loads Righty despite trembling fingers, her cherished principles of firearm maintenance conveniently forgotten.

  –––

  Odisseus has caught his scent. Nineteen months in the company of such singularly odiferous characters as The Unconstant Lover's unwashed crew had ingrained a veritable library of individual scents, musks and perfumes deep in the Ortok's sophisticated pallet, each one tied to a specific crew member. Most of the time, Odisseus ignores the sensation out of paw and is often only subconsciously aware that he's taking such detailed notes on the comings and goings of those around him.

  In the very occasional matter of locating a unique crewman, however, the Ortok need only follow the unintentional trail of interaction patches left behind by his quarry.

  For instance, as he stomps down the abovedecks hallway, Odisseus positively identifies Abraham Bonaventure, taking his ease of the sensor room via the distinctive blend of moonshine, Grimalti and the unexpected aid of a high quality cigar. Radiating his signature fusion of avarice, alcohol and aged leather as well as a corresponding pinch of blood's ironlike tang, Nemo shuffles listlessly several paces behind the rampaging Ortok. Danbonte, however, had placed a swab of exhaustion sweat, certainly from his hand, at shoulder's height on the corridor's corner ahead. He'd also, Odisseus predicts, coughed once before entering the hold, leaving behind a lingering cloud composite of vomit, Borsk brandy and something vaguely fungal that Odisseus can't place, most likely the byproduct of his breakfast.

  Odisseus practically breaks the hold's door release button, he slaps it so forcefully on his approach. The door blusters open with an electric crackle and a hydraulic hiss, the Lover's cargo hold yawning open before them both, comparatively spacious when held against the comfortably cramped corridors.

  With only Noxix's pilfered Wendengo, parked over the Beggarman's pre-established post in the starboard corner and without any crates of consignment taking up space between beams, the cargo hold of The Unconstant Lover is as barren as Odisseus has ever seen it. The odd piece of neglected detritus, trash swept carelessly into a corner rather than properly disposed of, a smattering of placeholder empty crates stacked as a pretense and the portside storage lockers are all that remains of the previous year's piracy.

  Were it not for the one doomed soul, huffing and puffing over a hefted strongbox near the hold's heart, the belly of The Unconstant Lover would have looked more like a shipwrecked ruin at the bottom of a scrap heap than the main body of an operating starship.

  In their initial haste to depart the headquarters of the former Galactic Menace ahead of his wrathful mobs, the twenty crates of Ott's 4.7 million credit payout had been piled and abandoned within spitting distance of the boarding ramp. As the last remaining member of the conscript crew, the duty fell to Danbonte to shift the score of strongboxes into the care of the Lover's de facto accountant, he of the sensor room, the moonshine and the cranky disposition.

  After tromping down the companionway stairs, his tail thumping behind him with every step as always, Odisseus feels the cold teltriton of the hold floor, vibrating wanly from the booster's strain, against the hardened pad of his hind paw before Danbonte even notices him. “Guess that old Grimalti motherbloomer wants to count everything out in the galley now? I don't fucking know.” Menace clear in his comportment, Odisseus closes to a handful of feet away and still Danbonte's oblivious, obtuse enough to hoist the next strongbox out as an offering toward the oncoming Ortok.

  It isn't until he's swiped the strongbox out of his hands, latch knocked open as it clatters to the floor and splays out its contents in an avalanche of currency, that the redskin finally comprehends the basest portion of Odisseus' intent. He opens his mouth to cry a protest, but the Ortok engulfs his meager humanoid throat with an enormous right paw. With a single shove, he forces Danbonte back into the nearest of the hold's bracing beams, a foot and a half off the floor and entirely at Odisseus' mercy to close his fist and sentence the throat beneath to the same fate as the Lover's old negative flux coupling.

  Expectedly thrashing some, but understanding, at least on some primal level, the predicament of his soon-to-be-broken neck, Danbonte croaks in surprise and outrage. “The fuck? Lemme–”

  “Got some questions for ya,” Nemo's voice interrupts the struggle, ominously apart from the distance and height of the companionway's top platform where he'd lingered. Danbonte altogether ceases his flailing to instead hang limply and behold the faraway visage of his accuser.

  “Nemo,” he murmurs in a hush, before remembering himself. “Captain, your dog's gone rabid–” he curses. Odisseus, in thanks, exerts enough pressure to blockade his vocal chords against whatever sixth word he was about to utter.

  Of course, the Captain ignores him. “Did you think no one would notice?”

  “What?”

  Fiddling with a trinket made indistinct by this distance, Nemo explicates calmly and without eye contact. “I'm curious – what exactly would your excuse have been?” He glances up to suggest, “The space lottery?” He continues turning the trifle over in his hands idly. “Some long-lost and heretofore unknown relative, great uncle Aloysius or fucking somebody, kicked it and left you a convenient pile of Inner-Sector-minted cash?”

  “Captain, Captain,” Danbonte attempts to address, jamming fingers at the edges of the Ortok's vise-grip, probing for purchase, “I don't even know what you're–”

>   “Found this little beauty in your personal effects,” he confesses, his tone of voice vaguely evoking a spouse cornering their disloyal mate.

  He holds aloft, pinched between thumb and forefinger, the small, stoppered vial of blood he'd showed Odisseus four minutes previously. This, the original evidence, had commanded Odisseus' undying loyalty in this ghastly business and all matters this close to the collective hearts of both saltbrothers. “Wrapped up in a tube sock. Like you were trying to hide your wallet at the beach.”

  Danbonte squints and turns an interesting shade of pink, evidently his equivalent of pale. “What is that, blood?” Danbonte shifts his weight fruitlessly “Look, look,” he squeaks, “Tell Moira I'm sorry, alright? I know they were friends and all and it wasn't nothing personal but I mean, an ex-naval officer? There's bound to be something there. Worth a look, anyway.”

  Nemo almost smirks. “You think this is about Garrigan,” he appreciates bluntly. “You think Odi and I came all the way down here to talk to you about Garrigan.” He switches the vial to his left hand. “Garrigan,” he reports, “isn't worth thirteen million credits.”

  “...oh, moons, you don't think I–”

  “I'm not sure,” Nemo admits with a shrug. “He, on the other hand,” he gestures the vial towards Odisseus, who obliges his saltbrother with the throatiest of growls.

  “Convince me otherwise.”

  No translation is necessary, potent threat rumbling behind Ortoki fangs the universal language. Danbonte sputters. “You gotta believe me, I wasn't anywhere near there, I didn't even–”

  Palming the vial and entombing both hands deeply in his duster pockets, Nemo questions conversationally. "Where were you?”

  Either confusion, embarrassment, guilt or some mixture therewith crosses Danbonte's red features before he scrapes together a mere “...I, uh,” as a reply.

  “Hm?” Nemo cranes forward. “Where?”

  “Listen, I'll tell you the truth, alright, even if it don't make me sound any more innocent,” Danbonte stipulates reluctantly. “I could lie, you understand, make up something that'd sound better, but I'm gonna be honest and tell you what actually happened.”

  “It's appreciated,” Nemo broadcasts withering faux-benevolence.

  “I fucking don't remember.”

  While too far-off to visually confirm, Odisseus knows, from long acquaintance, that Nemo's biting his lower lip with clenched frustration. “That a fact?” he manages at length.

  “I swear,” Danbonte pleads. “Last night, I remember drinking some, I remember marbles with some of Mutha's bottom-rung guys but, for whatever reason, everything after that, everything until this morning's gone, my hand to all the blooming moons.”

  Odisseus grits his teeth. “He does have brandy on the breath.”

  “What?” Danbonte quivers, visibly terrified of everything originating from the Ortok.

  “You're suggesting,” Nemo clarifies to Odisseus, “that he killed Ott in some kind of what, drunken haze?”

  “No, no,” Danbonte reaches both arms out to their limits, as if either to somehow physically distance himself from this latest theory or in a desperate attempt to recover the slack of the conversation, “I'm saying that I, I don't know, passed out or something. That I couldn't have done it – I wasn't conscious.”

  The Captain withdraws both hands from his pockets, the left still absently twiddling the vial between his fingers, deposits both elbows to the gangway railing before him and leans with a casual firmness forward. “Should I go through the rest of it, then?” he proposes, his tone adjusting somewhat to better resemble a parent reprimanding a guilty child who's stubborn about their alleged innocence. “Putting aside your thin as fuck story about booze amnesia and also the sorta salient fact that you were hiding, you know, a sample of his fucking blood,” he grants with a sharp point of the sample in question, “Rymple said, judging from the wound, a semiautomatic pistol's to blame for taking the back of Ott's skull off.”

  Danbonte points before Odisseus can stop him. “That don't mean–”

  “On top of that,” Nemo continues to nonchalantly tabulate, “I did a little research. You remember Zella, Salo, Heeko, Ebeneezer and it sounds like Garrigan too? Turns out they've all been posthumously cashed in.” His voice corrupts fully, up until now deceptively casual with that flinty hint of malice, into the pitiless tone he reserves for the servants of the Endless Imperium. “Turns out your bounty hunting license got renewed six months ago.”

  The redskin thrashes anew with fresh vigor, a decision Odisseus advises against with a blunt force reminder of the beam's unflinching teltriton reason. “This is a frame-up job, you fucking lunatics–”

  Odisseus roars pure fury into his face, certainly inflicting some minor ear damage and flecking his flailing red features with castoff spittle.

  On the edge of the Ortok's hazy peripheral, Nemo press the palm unburdened by Ott's blood against his temple. “Probably it's just the coin. Maybe the Imperium made you a special deal. Bloom,” he remarks, shuffling said hand through the stringy stands of his ebony mane, “what if you just did it for the laughs? Because, you know what, I think you're exactly the flavor of spineless pissant little lonktonkshit who'd damn an entire planet and arm the Imperium with all the repellent they can waste, just to make your cock look that much longer.”

  Sensing the climax, Danbonte digs his feeble nails into the coarse brown fur of Odisseus' knuckles, a last ditch endeavor to shirk the comeuppance enabling eventual genocide had afforded him. “It's, it's not–” he wheezes.

  Even had Danbonte been forming coherent sentences or thoughts, Nemo, and by proxy Odisseus, is entirely deaf to them. With a simple motion, Nemo releases the pinch his left fingers hold over the vial.

  In the space of a second, the tiny glass capsule splinters on the galvanized teltriton plates below the companionway, blood worth a Galactic Menace's ransom seeping into dents and imperfections in the metal. “There's your fucking thirteen million,” he offers mutteringly, before adding an conclusive evaluation. “In my mind, the only thing worse than you is them.”

  His ghost of a nod is many times more prompting than Odisseus requires.

  Snarling all the while, he raps the back of Danbonte's skull once, nice and hard, against the teltriton pillar for good measure before resolving to let the bracing beam off easy and to handle the heavy lifting himself. The blow to the back of the head rendering intelligible speech something of an impossibility, Danbonte lolls forward, groaning stupidly, as Odisseus closes a second mitt around the other half of the bounty hunter's throat. Prying him off the pillar with both paws, the Ortok begins to throttle him. Four shakes in, Danbonte's body convulses spasmodically like a landed trout and the Ortok's thumb claw first pierces skin. Soon, all nine of its counterparts join in, rending flesh, tendon and esophagus beneath. Eight shakes in, Danbonte's nearly headless and long past dead, Odisseus' rage not subsiding until the shorn stub of an artery had exhaustively doused the Ortok, the beam, the floor, anything unfortunate enough to land within a certain radius from the messy murder, in thick gobs of the redskin's inky black blood.

  At last, with only a scuffed and shivered stretch of spinal cord still attaching Danbonte's head to his shoulders, a huffing, blood-drenched and slowly becalming Odisseus, with images of his childhood gradually banished from his animal brain, relaxes his hold on the corpse. What's left of Danbonte piles to the deck at the Ortok's feet and continues to ooze blood. Where once a berserk beast stood and remorselessly squeezed loose a life, now only a humble mechanic, frightened by the horror before him and still more by the horror the Endless Imperium has brewed within him, staggers awkwardly back from the emptying carcass of the Lover's last mercenary.

  High on the companionway, Nemo leans heavily over the rail, having evidently watched the spectacle of his saltbrother's savagery unblinking. The faintest suggestion of a satisfied smile plays about his lips.

  –––

  Moira, sudsy to the elbows, s
uddenly stops scrubbing to wonder if her uncharacteristic volunteering for the extremely unpopular dish duty might actually have given her away. In all honesty, she didn't much mind the actual task of dishwashing. Her persistent refusals whenever Odisseus attempted to threaten, bribe or cajole some hapless crewmember into the kitchen-work stemmed from a spirited desire to stave off the servile housewife comparison. With a pair of certifiable misogynists aboard, one could never been entirely too careful concerning such a comparison.

  There was something calmingly familiar about the methodical way one washed dishes by hand and, on those rare occasions when she offered up her services, she privately imagined it as some manner of recompense for Odisseus' culinary endeavors.

  This instance, however, with each of the original five crew members in some heightened state between suspicion, dread, outrage and self-loathing, she'd perhaps invited too much scrutiny with her anomalous offer. After a moment of recoil, they'd accepted readily enough, or at least without audible complaint. Twenty minutes later, she and the scrub brush had been left virtually to their own devices, excepting Abraham's lingering presence in the main galley room with the copious piles of dough.

  The automatic scrubber across the aisle had gone the way of oft-forgotten laundry mainframe installed in the hold's port corner and promptly committed ritualistic suicide during Moira's first week aboard. The crew, denied the hands-off convenience the scrubber provided, had roundly rebelled against the very notion of minute manual labor ever since. From that point on, the Lover's disparate mismatch of plates, glasses, bowls and flatware, comprised mainly of leftovers from the previous owners and donations from each of the original five crew members, were stacked from sink to ceiling. Every few months, chagrined amateur chef Odisseus was forced to engage in an hours-long dishwashing binge, during which anyone aboard with any love of their own life steered entirely clear of the galley.