Hull Damage

by Timothy J Meyer

  Following the hiring and successive killing of the bygone conscript crew, Odisseus had instituted a new policy. After whittling the entire volume of The Unconstant Lover's dishes to a single set for all fifteen aboard, the Ortok would, upon the latest death of a hired gun, destroy, dispatch or otherwise remove one such set, to better represent the number of mouths to feed and subsequently clean up after.

  Danbonte's death is therefore confirmed, after the first hint of the voluminous pool of black blood staining the hold floor, by the sight of a fresh bowl, plate, glass, fork, spoon and knife, all smashed and shattered on the top of the galley garbage can. Upon seeing this, partially for the kicks and partially to further fuel her specifically composed air of amused ambivalence toward the entire affair, she collected a sampling of Danbonte's spilt blood, in the minutes before Odisseus' belatedly prepared lunch of zulfshell clam chowder.

  She knew the redskin was almost certainly too small time to be worth the effort and that any posting he might had accrued on whatever bloomhole rock he originated from would be the chumpest of change, but Moira supposed it was the principle rather than the payday that granted the idea irony.

  The chowder, not a bad outing on Odisseus' part, had been consumed in absolute silence, each of the Lover's crewmen mired in individual thoughts of gloom and doom. Moira was the first finished, her unaffectedness an affectation she might have compromised by her willingness to tidy up. Two-Bit completed his secondly, departing the galley for parts amid the ship unknown. Odisseus took his leave shortly thereafter, certainly toward the engine room, the aftereffects of Danbonte's murder a palpable weight around his neck. Nemo'd only relinquished his empty bowl and thousand-zottible stare at prompting from Abraham, toward the end of setting coordinates toward Takioro, their inevitable destination and the necessary platitudes, outrageous tributes and groveling at Velocity's hooves therein. Three quarters of the dish work and an engaged warp later, the Grimalti returned to his post at the center of the crew's tables. There he now sits, carefully parceling out enormous individual shares toward The Unconstant Lover and her last five souls, all of this presided over by a scrappy purple-and-blue spotted plushie Moira couldn't recall seeing before.

  The soup pot, a cast-iron son of a bitch whose tendency to stain would give most disintegrators pause and subsequently the last dish, grants Moira an appreciated window to meditate on the ramifications of her previous evening's handiwork.

  She only killed two people, one directly, one indirectly, one the Galactic Menace and guilty of a litany of crimes and atrocities that Moira, a hired murderer herself, couldn't comfortably take the moral high ground against, the other a weasel-faced prick capable of small cruelties but otherwise undeserving of the death he'd received. She'd also, potentially, bought some small degree of retribution for Glive Garrigan, an unjust casualty of a war he'd deserted years ago.

  Beyond that, she'd torn Ott's campaign to tatters and therefore had won Baz for the Endless Imperium. She'd inadvertently assimilated the complacent Baziron, like the Dancing-Horizon, and she'd subjugated, if not outright slaughtered, the defiant Baziron, like the Scream-Weeds. Lastly, she'd supplied the forces of law, order and good government, forces she, as a professional pirate, was diametrically opposed to, with a practically infinite supply of capital-ship-busting weapons and, in all likelihood, destroyed a planet, in the time-honored tradition of Nos Mantri and Twin Telta.

  None of this, of course, accounted for the resultant and apparently profound psychological repercussions amongst The Unconstant Lover's depleted crew, those, she reminds herself, who were professedly her allies and now, however unspoken, her closest approximation of friends.

  It's this last point, the one missing all the grandeur and galaxy-shaping fanfare, that sticks so firmly in her craw as she stows the soup pot, dries her hands with the dish towel dyed beige by overuse and strides apart from the galley, with the unexpressed intention of hiding in her topturret's non-judgmental haven.

  A sentence from the craggy voice seated behind her halts her hard in her tracks.

  “That Danbonte of yers spent the night pissing himself sick in the back corner of Ott's mess hall,” Abraham instigates, like a peal of thunder past the horizon that harbingers a storm.

  Frozen in her tracks at the doorway, Moira is keenly aware of the weight of her revolvers in their shoulder holsters. “Yeah?”

  “Ye poisoned him. Vapid, I expect. Only way to blank the memory that bad.” He takes the sudden small breath of realization. “Wager it was Garrigan's stash, come to think of it.”

  “Anyone else know?” she presses carefully.

  “Ye fed Nemo what he wanted, somebody disposable, and now that's had his fill, he won't go lookin' anymore. Goes double for the Ortok,” Abraham speculates. “Two-Bit'd be a concern if he weren't so blastedly bribable.” She can imagine him nodding behind her, wattle wagging more from condescension than from the movement of his bloated Grimalti head. “Ye did good, missy, ye did passable fair but I'm afraid there be more'n one hole in that little story ye cooked up for the Cap'n and, worse still,” the smile is painfully present in his voice, “ye forgot about me.”

  With a gunfighter's patience, Moira turns herself completely about face in four languorous steps. The Grimalti navigator threatens his chair with toppling he's leaned his bulk so far back, exact image of magnanimous mockery Moira'd imagined painted across his crinkled blubbery face. “Do we need to have a talk?”

  “Just that little one,” comes his customarily enigmatic answer. They lock gazes for a moment, two brands of obstinance butting heads, his the arrogance born of exhaustive personal experience, hers the confidence of exhaustive personal conditioning. “Think it suffice to say,” Abraham explicates, breaking the stalemate, “I got me some plans for our boy up there and they sure as moons didn't involve no Boss Ott.” That said, with a cockeyed smirk to match his cockeyed countenance, Abraham Bonaventure slumps his capacious build forward to the table top and advances, at arm's reach, two strongboxes, visibly brimming with her cut of the cash. “Here ye be, missy.”

  Not entirely convinced this isn't some ploy to occupy both of her hands while he produces his pre-Imperium blunderbuss from nowhere, Moira reaches tentatively out and takes ahold of the two strongboxes. With her best impression of an appreciative nod, she turns to stride down the betweendecks corridor.

  The burden of her secret is, through Abraham's tacit approval, lifted, if only in a small and untrustworthy way.

  Final Interlude

  The Unconstant Lover whimpered like a muzzled beast when the graviton lock hit. At first, her whole mismatched hull only growled from the shock of impact. With the sudden cancellation of her forward momentum, however, the old JR1 Nautiloid Shell-Class jetboosters began to sputter and whine with their denial, refusing to let up. Instead of continuing forward, the infinitesimal difference in fuel efficiency between the two boosters forced her to list as far to port as the still-establishing graviton lock would allow, an action the propulsion computer belatedly compensated as best it could. The Unconstant Lover, caught between the two extremes, began to sway back and forth, like a shark swimming in place.

  Her helm, in response, splashed a confusing and contradictory array of warnings and alerts across the dozen and more available display screens. To the two humanoids occupying the pilot and co-pilot's seats, neither of whom had quite acclimated themselves to all six hundred some of the Briza's unique and thorny quirks, this development seemed worthy of a certain degree of confoundment and consternation.

  “The bloom now?” Nehel Morel, known more colloquially by the handy portmanteau Nemo, surveyed the objecting monitors surrounding him with thinly veiled embarrassment. As her Captain, he felt that a general understanding of all the Lover's inner workings fell solidly under his list of responsibilities. With only four months behind the wheel of anything larger than a one-man fightercraft, however, he was often still clueless as to a problem's specific nature long after trial-and-error had reached
an agreeable compromise.

  In the wheeling gyroscopic shielding station to the Captain's immediate starboard, his co-pilot squinted into his sensory equipment. “Something didn't fall off, did it?” Two-Bit Switch, hustler, scofflaw and maker of a dozen varieties of trouble, was the crew's most recent recruit, following a famously successful prison break on Nemen Uil Maximum Security Imperial Penitentiary. By his reckoning, he had only served as the Lover's co-pilot and point man for a month and four days.

  Nemo bit his bottom lip and tapped three random keys on the nearest keypad to no success. “Hope not. Pretty sure this was the last weekend on the warranty.”

  “Fuck me in the exhaust pipe,” Two-Bit suggested, hopefully hypothetically, as the centralized sensory computer finally got its lonktonks in a row and flashed a rather salient read-out on the co-pilot's main screen. “Cap'n, we got a graviton lock.”

  “What? From where?”

  “You ain't gonna ball it up,” Two-Bit warned gravelly. “It's from the Eye.”

  In unison, both pilot and co-pilot broke eye contact and turned their gaze directly out the viewport before them. An irregular black blot against the cerulean ice ball beyond, the Vbeck & Rhissol UZ4 Asylum-Class Medium Cargo Transport currently broadcasting ident as The Weather Eye had, when it first arrived at their rendezvous point above Bozee, appeared every inch the gawky, unfashionable middleweight hauler they'd been expecting. In the light of these new graviton-related developments, however, the abnormally shaped silhouette before them had abruptly taken on an ominous and perhaps even sinister aspect.

  “...the fuck?” Nemo muttered, swapping his attention between the distant Eye, the bleeping controls and the incredulous Two-Bit. “Mongoose swore up and down by this guy!”

  Two-Bit tilted his head aside. “Well, what does that jabb about Mongoose?”

  “Whaddya think?” the Captain theorized. “More pirates?” Two-Bit only shrugged and Nemo allowed himself a momentary bluster. “Better not be. I need to get winked-and-wooled like I need another hole in my hull.” After several unsuccessful attempts to do anything useful by twisting switches and ramming buttons, Nemo finally reached for a set of controls he was comfortable with. “Unconstant Lover to Weather Eye, Unconstant Lover to Weather Eye,” he hailed and, as soon as the connection comes live, tossed his arms wide. “All the moons, man! It's only toothpaste anyway! We'll give you a fair price!”

  Crackling over the comm channel came their paling reply. “Unidentified captain-lord of smuggler vessel-craft 'Unconstant Lover,' on the authority-powers of the Zibbian Federation, you are hereby ordered to power down your–” the mangled Commercial of an overpaid Zibbian police captain droned until Nemo muted the channel from fear.

  Two-Bit swallowed hard. “Oh, shitstains.”

  “We got stung,” Nemo appreciated.

  The helm's door slid open so silently, neither Nemo nor Two-Bit, especially over the sounds of strident alarms and straining starship, noticed the entrance of Odisseus. Real name unpronounceable in Commercial, the paunchy otterfolk served an unenviable double duty as Nehel Morel's saltbrother and The Unconstant Lover's mechanic. His first sentence, to Two-Bit only a string of growls, yips and snarls but to Nemo a coherent and intelligible thought, surprises the both of them nonetheless.

  “Are we graviton locked?”

  “Um,” Nemo stalled, “why do you ask?”

  The Ortok thumbed a claw over his sloping shoulder. “'cause the manual override is shooting sparks again and, call me crazy, but the only reason that should be happening would be, you know, if we were graviton locked.”

  Nemo planted both palms together in an assuaging gesture. “We're maybe a little graviton locked. Two-Bit, how much are we graviton locked?”

  “Dohick here says we're into them for 29% rigidity.”

  “See? Not even thirty.”

  Odisseus contorted his mustelid features. “Into whom for 29% rigidity? The buyer?”

  With obvious apprehension, Nemo reached over to unmute the comm frequency between Lover and Eye. As though they'd never been interrupted, the authorative voice on the opposite side of the call rattled on. “–repeat, on the authority-powers of the Zibbian Federation, power down your weapons system-guns, cut your engine-motors and prepare to–” Nemo replaced his thumb on the mute button.

  “...you're shitting me,” Odisseus intoned.

  “'fraid not. I guess Mongoose hung us out to dry.”

  Odisseus shook his head with frustrated disgust. “Told you he was wearing a wire.”

  “Guy's had skinworms for the past seven months,” Nemo exclaimed defensively. “I see a weird bump under his shirt, I'm not gonna say anything, alright?” He inched the helmsman's chair to face his instruments again, before adding, “Plus, he's the only fence I know, so.”

  “I got a bloke in statee we could jabb at next time,” Two-Bit offered cheerfully. “Oh. 38%,” he followed up less cheerfully.

  “So, what?” Odisseus questioned. “This is it? We're cooked?”

  “Surrender?” Nemo blurted. “What're you, new here? You wanna be dropping the soap in some Zibbian prison the rest of your life for contraband trafficking?”

  “Federation'll only clink for fifteen, iffen we can jank it down to Stolen Goods,” Two-Bit informed out of hand. “That, and the joint they got on Zulfo's got big fat exhaust vents, the fucks.”

  “Bloom that,” Nemo opined. “Time makes me lose my marbles. You remember the forty-five minutes I spent in the drunk-tank at the Underglow Precinct House?” he directed over his shoulder to his saltbrother. “I near about chewed my nine-year-old arm off.”

  Odisseus sighed wistfully. “How could I forget?”

  “Oh, hey, the party's in here,” the singularly feminine voice of Moira Quicksilver, also not her birth name, observed. Her entrance was likewise masked by the hush of the helm door and practically jumped the Lover's captain, cutpurse and mechanic out of their respectively sweaty, slimy and shaggy skins. The ex-bounty hunter rarely visited the helm, preferring the privacy of the topturret, the medbay and occasionally her own quarters in what four months had taught her to be something of a proverbial sausage factory.

  She lingered jauntily in the doorway, squinting forward through the viewport. “Is that the buyer out there? Flashing those police-strips?” She snorts. “That's a clever trick.” The awkwardness of the abounded silence that greeted said observation seemed to speak for itself. “Unless they're actual police strips on an actual police cruiser and we're about to get fucked. Are we about to get fucked?” A heartfelt reprise of the crew's previous silence confirmed Moira's suspicions better than words ever could. “Sublime. I knew that wasn't a skinworm.”

  Nemo pitched his hands into the air. “Well, excuse the fuck me!”

  “We're thinking of repelling boarders, then?”

  Two-Bit grimaced as he pivoted about to face her. “If they've been diddling out here all day, fixing to kuckle us, they'll be decking bloody task forces of camos with fire-breathing plonkers and every blooming thing.”

  A spark, a light the fledgling crew of The Unconstant Lover had not yet learnt to fear, enkindled behind the ashen eyes of their Captain, the beginnings of a truly piratical notion. “Zibbians'll be looking to take us alive, right?” he asked of Two-Bit, his attention focused nowhere.

  “Should be.”

  “Then let's do something stupid.” Uttered with honest simplicity, these words boded for the crew the beginning of a continuing career of mitigating said necessary stupidities from those decidedly less so, as, in the Captain's book, there were quite nearly always the same thing. “Abraham!” Nemo shouted into the interior comm channel. “You doddering old bastard, you awake?”

  A fumbling sound, the unmistakable clatter of shattered glass and the hoary snorting of an immortal Grimalti yanked rudely from sleep all proceeded Abraham's groggy reply. “Haul on the main brace!”

  “Uh, sure,” Nemo agreed. “Listen, I need dead point coordinates outta here a
nd I need 'em last year! Don't ask questions! Two-Bit, where we at?”

  “43% rigidity.”

  His blatant disregard for segues breaking the sound barrier, Nemo flipped several switches with considerably more purpose than previously while barking new streams of orders. “Get ready to double-fold bombard shields dead bang over the bow. For this to work, I'mana need Moira in the turret and Odi in the engine room.”

  “Aye aye,” Moira complied with relish before disappearing down the corridor.

  “To do what? Make peace with my gods?”

  “No time for talking. Move!”

  With a stifled grumble and the meanest of mean looks, Odisseus shuffled his bulk down the helm's half-flight of stairs and plodded with as much speed as his stubby rear haunches would allow.

  By the time Moira'd made the comparatively short jog into the gundeck and up the access ladder to the Lover's practically unused Antagonist and Odisseus has completed the significantly longer trek down the abovedecks corridor, across the hold, down an access ladder of his own and through the cramped orlop tunnel to the slightly-less cramped engine room, Two-Bit reported 59% rigidity on the Eye's graviton lock. The plan percolating in the untamed regions of Nemo's brain had spiked a considerable amount in both difficulty and danger, which he was less than loathe to admit was part and parcel of the idea's entire attraction.

  “Those shields ready yet?” he pressed.

  “Coupla seconds here,” Two-Bit delayed with one hand placating Nemo, the other dialing around the rig's main control panel. “Still getting a feel for all the bells and whistles.”

  “Soon as you get them, shoot 'em up. Moira,” he addressed into his headset, “you know what a graviton projector looks like?”

  The unimpressive reception quality of the Lover's undedicated comm channel distorted her reply. “A general impression.”