“Dipshit forgot,” Nemo becalms with cool collectedness masking furious schmoozing, “He's dumb like that.”
“Yeah, I'm–” Two-Bit starts.
“He's shutting up now, isn't he?”
Compelled to comply, Two-Bit rams his mouth closed and raises both palms in surrender.
“And you?” Velocity dangles toward Nemo.
“I'm shutting up too.”
The Depot-Commissioner lingers undecided another second before guardedly lowering herself back into her chair, glare dead set on Two-Bit and legs still coiled to spring back up should this be some elaborate ploy for him to speak again. “Overall damages to the station,” she concludes in the moment before sitting down, “comes to thirteen thousand.”
“Eighty-five total?” Moira calculates. “Tidy.”
“We ain't done yet,” Velocity chuckles. “Eighty-five's for the station and everybody else. That's not me.” She plunks an elbow to the chair's crown, extending her thumb, pointer and middle fingers as conditions of some unquestionably domineering and irrefutable pain-in-the-ass yet to be inflicted upon their unhappy selves. “I want three things; take them or go fuck yourself. First of all,” she begins with the slightest flick of her thumb, “I need assurances that no Galactic Menace or no Huong Xo is gonna come kicking my airlock door down or humping my leg off to find you. You don't lie to me, you'd don't bring trouble to the station and I do not abide the merest whiff of any more buhoxshit, understand?” This surprisingly reasonable request is met with exuberant nods all around. “Secondly,” she continues, tucking the thumb away, “I want sixty-five. For myself. A gratuity. You know,” she tags on with a sneer.
Nemo breaks the silence with a sidelong nitpick. “...little high for a gratuity.”
“Well, then,” Velocity rephrases, “for pain and aggravation and whatever the fuck. Sixty-five ICC. In cash. Before you leave today.”
The Ortok voices the obvious question.
“Rith.” The word is chocolate in Velocity's mouth and she savors it as such. “That's number three,” she confesses, dropping her pointer finger and leaving the middle finger still standing in a manner she must imagine to be cheeky.
Nemo buzzes a disappointed sigh. “Aw, Vel–”
“Consider it a favor to Baigo and me. Or, rather,” she amends, “don't. Consider it me fucking with you.” The following smile is cheap theater. “Non-negotiable.” She replaces thumb, pointer and middle to their previously extended position, retracting each as she reminds the reluctant pirates of each of her specific demands. “No shenanigans, one hundred fifty thou, that year-old Rith caper.” She holds her middle finger fast as a reminder of the consequences of refusal. “Yes or fuck off.”
The decision's crux weighs clearly on the crew. Resolving to return to Takioro's ribald Rings with their tails between their legs, make peace with Velocity by begging from scraps at her already reasonably scrappy table and move on with their lives as best they could had been a simple enough decision to arrive at fifteen days ago, in cold theoretical space. Here, though, even under such obvious and apparent duress, Velocity's scraps had quite suddenly become a surprisingly hard pill to swallow.
If anyone in Bad Space is ballsy enough to refute the Depot-Commissioner in her own house on her own terms, it must be the Captain. “One twenty-five,” he proposes, as though this was actually the price she'd named.
Velocity doesn't blink. “One fifty.”
Odisseus follows up with a statement of three syllables, whose meaning is no mystery to Two-Bit.
“One fifty,” Velocity counters and confirms.
Even Moira takes a crack. “One forty-five.”
“One fifty.”
“One forty eight?” Two-Bit, the born haggler and entirely unable to help himself, squeaks meekly.
“One sixty-five.”
“One fifty it is!” Nemo agrees with a certain degree of desperate conviction. Each pirate exhales, either in relief or confusion. Extraordinarily eager to be removed from the situation and left to their own devices as fast as Velocity's hooves can carry her, all four shift and budge uncomfortably in their seats in the manner of impatient restaurant patrons, waiting for the bill. Nemo even half-stands, limited though he is by the ratio of table to booth, and addresses the crowd of onlookers as though charged with imperative business requiring immediate attention. “Now, if you'll all quite excuse us, my good hoodlums, we have ourselves some puppies to smuggle.”
The ring of eight gunmen that encircles their booth, all armed with and currently brandishing heavy assault weapons of various varieties and all specimens Two-Bit recognizes, as an unofficial expert in Takioro's personnel and patronage, as the very happiest of the trigger-happy variety of hired muscle, glance to Velocity. As she nods, they each inch several steps away, but don't dare remove their weapons from their carefully trained positions at the crew's heads. The only exception, of course being Traasha, one arm in a sling, the other clutching her 387 Absconder carbine in claws quivering with rage, who doesn't move a single muscle and instead bores holes into Moira's head with a glare that could burn nitroglycerin.
Velocity rises unceremoniously from her seat, signals her bevy of goons with a bored gesture and tromps with equal boredom toward the exit, tossing her last remark over her shoulder without a scrap of eye contact. “Square up with me before you leave or don't bother coming back.”
The necessary arrangements made, the unnecessary platitudes extended, Velocity and her squad of hard-bought bruisers march out of The Bloody Afterburn and disappear among the agog spectators crowding the Second Ring street outside, each hoping to catch a glimpse of the million credit bounty head and the bane of capital warships galaxywide. For their part, Captain Nemo and his three lieutenants, each with assholes sore from the hour and more of their proverbial chewing, wallow sullenly in the corner booth where the Depot-Commissioner had left them for many silent minutes as the Afterburn's patronage begins to trickle back inside.
As clamor and carousal returns to the oddly calm tavern, Odisseus finally extends some manner of question an allowable interval past Velocity's mighty earshot. Nemo responds with the deadliest of possible responses.
“I mean, sure. What could possibly go wrong?”
–––
Kolfo, of Yezza, Kolfo & Associates, raises his hand and forearm to block the strident rays of the Rithese noontide sun and jangles the clump of change and bills in his closed left fist. His morning duties and clients had cut severely into his lunch hour and he was now possessed of less than twelve minutes to jaywalk across the busy thoroughfare in front of his offices, purchase a Pickled Pacho Paw from the Pickle Planet kiosk across the street, devour his briny meal and jog back, hopefully with a few minutes to spare, in which to prepare for his first afternoon appointment.
Unfortunately, the flow of traffic at this particular time of day is dizzyingly thick, especially in this particular neighborhood so close to the city's center. The stream of driftcars, occasional wheeled vehicles and the passing divisions of the inner city tramway complicate the issue of his crossing into a near life-and-death scenario. After several tempting but ultimately too risky chances, Kolfo's opening comes and he shoots the gap, walking the semi-hurried walk of a rabbity pedestrian ready to break into a bolt at the first sign of his miscalculation.
The Pickle Planet kiosk is ideally situated directly in front of the point of his crossing, as though by design. The earthy Duutho teenager operating the stand is polite, pretty and forgettable, with her swarthy skin and fragrant dreadlocks of coarse black nerve endings, and is only too eager to indulge Kolfo's weekly indulgence of grease and gopher meat. Rather than joining his colleagues in their firm's recreation room with a bowl of iced fruit salad, Kolfo, once a week, fed the behemothic corporate monster that was Pickle Planet with his 22.75 ICC and fed his own craving for decadence and salt with a Pickled Pacho Paw.
His wife, of course, would be horrified, but as long as he wasn't careless enough to leave the
receipt or the wrapper in his blazer pocket, she didn't necessarily need to be kept abreast of his lunchtime dietary habits.
He's wandered a handful of steps away from the Duutho, to safely consume his morsel under cover of a turned shoulder and he's even lifted the dripping paw to his mouth before he first hears it. Initially, it's the sound's distance that's its primary virtue and Kolfo stops his meal short to strain his ears and attempt to discern or detect any more salient details about what, precisely, he's hearing. Within seconds, though, he's doubly repaid for his efforts, as the sound materializes, with stark surety: an engine, opened entirely to full throttle. An aircraft or low-flying spaceship is Kolfo's best guess, judging by its apparent altitude, approaching with incredible speed from downtown.
Before he's really registered its passing, it's whizzed by overhead. A blockish teltriton blur, a displeasing shade of yellow in color, spews behind twin gouts of blistering blue flame that trace thick clouds of unwholesome exhaust as it flies past, low enough to the ground to pop both Kolfo's ears and rumble the very street below in its wake. He's not able to remark to anyone or even recover his eardrums before another layer of the original distant sound announces its presence split seconds later with a squeal.
A disconcerting number of low-atmosphere driftcraft, perhaps ten or fifteen, each stamped boldly with both the “Rith Policing Corporation” logo and a corresponding strip of flashing lights, thunder past a blink of an eye behind their apparent prey, the ugly urine-colored spaceship, sirens in clamorous complaint and engines apparently overtaxed to catch their fleeing culprit.
Three seconds later, the whole spectacle is vanished, rampaging over buildings and streets blocks away to the north. Kolfo, once frozen in surprise, remembers himself, exchanges a confounded look with the Duutho behind the pushcart, muses privately on the wonders and annoyance of living in Bad Space and bites into his pickled gopher meat.
–––
Odisseus wallows in his usual spot in the usual corner booth at The Bloody Afterburn, complete with three broken teeth, a deeply ingrained aversion to Duutho gourmet cooking and a blistering sunburn. Their triple-pronged confrontation with the local Port Authority, the Rithese Policing Corporation and even some renegade members of the neighborhood terrorist element twelve days past had left the remainder of the crew also in various different degrees of personal injury.
Bandages still swaddle Two-Bit's head. Nemo's throat is encircled with obviously swollen lacerations. A multicolored mural of bruises is painted across Moira's knuckles, the sort one only accrues by punching someone literally to death. Each pirate, Odisseus included, stares down the barrel of their individual alcohols, privately wondering whether the deceptively simple act of lifting said tankard to their lips would also find some way to blow up in their collective faces.
The Bloody Afterburn they ignore somewhere to their left is diametrically opposed to the tavern they'd left behind a month previously. The rambunctious discord of an especially wild weeknight debauch bounces about the room beyond their secluded booth.
Some bush league buccaneer Odisseus didn't recognize, a Mantrian boasting an amalgam of piercings sprouting from seemingly every orifice on his body and an exhilaration too overwrought to indicate anything but a first-timer, had apparently knocked over some drifttrain on Prash that had been in the process of making a transfer between local bank branches and was, unsurprisingly, stacked to the ceiling with untraceable cash. His and his crew's celebration having now trampled far past the three-hour-mark without indication of ceasing any time soon, Odisseus would normally have entertained thoughts of strangulation, but with Danbonte only days cold and his mood quite completely in the toilet, he nurses his Gitterswitch and grumbles moodily instead.
Twelve months previously, it'd been the four of them, Nemo ebullient with the promise of fresh and exciting piracy, Moira fidgety at the sight of anyone's hand any number of inches from their respective holsters, Two-Bit receiving an over-priced lap dance from an alive and unhired Zella and Odisseus, admittedly surly and unpleasant, but with all his teeth and a nose oblivious to the horrors of the Rithese desert sun, carousing and cavorting about the Defederate Station like they'd commandeered the place themselves. To see them now, they were another four and entirely dissimilar handful of desperadoes, soiling the Afterburn's penultimate corner booth with the depths of their despondency.
Nemo drums listlessly against the table's lip at an irregular and unresolved tempo, more from the habit he's unwilling or unable to shake than from any more of his heedless exuberance. Two-Bit's leaned fully back in his seat, bandaged head propped against the booth's backboard as though asleep, only sparing the occasional glance at the posterior of the passing new waitress, a Trijan girl with yellow streaks through her musty hair and the subject of a great deal of in-station speculation as to her relation with Roger, be she mistress or daughter. Moira's not even concerned about the possibility of being shot she's so distracted, her gaze fixated at the dregs of her drink rather than scanning the saloon for potential assailants or exit points.
Odisseus himself, watching all this with gloomy resignation, reasons this'll soon be ended to everyone's satisfaction. Velocity would doubtlessly arrive within the hour, ream them out over their inept bungling of the Rith puppy caper with that certain coarse thoroughness unique to her and, this tribute paid, the dejected crew of The Unconstant Lover could retreat back to their spaceship to sulk in private. He's passingly wondering which of the Lover's dozens of systems so recently damaged by police disabler cannons to begin his cathartic repairs with when Nemo finally usurps the sustained silence.
“Okay, so, idea,” he proposes with a certain apprehension but clearly something to address, “let's do a little survey. How many of you knew he had a cybernetic arm?” Sequentially, each of his three officers, first Odisseus, then Two-Bit and lastly Moira, raise their hands. “Really?” he objects rather than questions. “And none of you smug fuckers thought to mention this?”
“We assumed you knew!” Odisseus finds himself protesting quite stridently.
“He had a tattoo!” Nemo counters.
“You can get tattoos on cybernetic arms,” Odisseus assures him. “I've seen it before.”
“Least they didn't do a strip search,” Two-Bit mutters.
“Where?” Nemo continues defiantly. “Where have you seen it before?”
“Boy Blaster has one. Fuck, he has like, seven.”
“Cybernetic arms?”
Moira, never missing a chance to correct Nemo, utters without eye contact. “Tattoos.”
“On his cybernetic arm,” Odisseus provides.
Nemo musses up his expression. “Right or left?”
“Left.”
“Shit in my pants,” his saltbrother remarks amazed. “I did not know that.” He ponders this a moment, the conversation nearly dying, before he opens his mouth with another asinine observation. “Not to change the subject, but I always sorta wondered how that 'cybernetic arm thing' would work. You know, for the whole business of...” he insinuates with a wholly unsubtle hand gesture.
“Yeah,” Moira interjects, eager to prove everyone's understanding of the topic at hand.
Nemo, however, being Nemo, is entirely oblivious. “Milking the one-eyed crotch worm of the Pants Nebula.”
Moira and Odisseus share an exasperated sigh and a face-to-palm moment respectively, though, in truth Odisseus is somewhat relieved to have a discussion at all. As Nemo's lewdness threatens to condemn the conversation back into doldrums, it's Odisseus who risks stoking the flames some to suggest, “Maybe you should have asked him. That customs officer, I mean.”
His hand returning reflexively toward the redness of his neck, Nemo squints in appraisal. “Little difficult to get a word in edgewise. You know, when you're being strangled to death.”
“I'd imagine.”
“Still,” Two-Bit comments, not rising from his slouched posture to properly engage. “Very rangu, us not gettin' strip-searched.”
>
As the sound of the uninvolved festivities fills their conversational lull, Odisseus is stricken by the fleeting, self-extrapolating and irrational fear that no one will bother to fill the void with more conversation. In that unheralded and ignominious moment, Odisseus fears The Unconstant Lover's crew has reached the end of its effectiveness and relationship. Before he realizes what's happening, Odisseus will be returned to Dirty Djembe's Discount Engine Repair with Nemo and all these strange, infuriating people vanished from his life once and for all.
Ironically, it's morose Moira who speaks next and rescues Odisseus from a fate worse than death. “Baigo smelt fucking awful.” The pirates, as one, chuckle or bluster out breaths of bewilderment in recollection and the Ortok cannot help at smile at the first mate's seeming self-sacrifice.
“Thank you!” Odisseus exclaims suddenly in sheer commiseration. “Thank you!”
“Like stir-fried shit,” Nemo hypothesizes.
Moira crinkles her brow. “Who stir-fries shit?”
“And bad, bad carbon petro,” Odisseus conjures from his olfactory memory, his vastly superior nose purchasing him unwittingly front row seats to the spectacle of unadulterated repugnance that was Velocity's brother. “And arlaxi piss. And tabasco sauce. And jborra litter.”
“I was about to say something,” Nemo boasts, as though this probability would come as a bald-faced shock to his companions.
Rather than snarking, Moira corroborates with something unseen on her harsh, pale features – a smile. "I know you were. I could tell.”
“Yeah?”
“You had that,” Odisseus confirms with two knowing nods and the vestigial beginnings of a smile on his own muzzle, “'I-have-some-douchey-remark-all-chambered' face. Plain as day.”
Nemo scowls to mask his somewhat flattered smirk. “I have a face?”
“Yes, Nemo,” Moira deigns with playful mockery. “You have a face.”
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