Galactic Menace

by Timothy J Meyer

  “You blokes might consider pickin' up the fookin' pace, like,” Flask advises.

  “We ain't half done over here.” There's more grunting, the sound someone makes when lifting something heavy, on his cousin's end of the line. “Can you stall?”

  Flask shrugs, with a particular eye to the combat shotgun leveled unerringly at his head. “Let's find out, shall we?” He clicks the comm channel closed.

  The truly frustrating aspect of this whole dilemma was that now, in the eyes of both Nemo's forbidding first mate and that incorrigible prick Two-Bit, Flask looked like an amateur wet-end. Certainly the imminent threat of incarceration or his skull becoming a ditrogen-smoking crater was concerning, but the last thing Flask needed was the appearance that he couldn't pull a decent caper together with both hands and untraceable fingerprints.

  Everything'd gone so swimmingly up until this exact moment. The first bank cooperated fully, the uniforms flew flawlessly, no alarms were raised. Yet, here they were, not quite halfway through emptying out the second bank when trouble, incarnated this week by a thickly armored driftcar and matching pair of shotgun-wielding rent-a-cops, arrived.

  These exact types of snags, these random spells of ill fortune, were never the sorts of things that afflicted Flask's jobs. Rather, they never afflicted Flask's jobs anymore – ever since his gatecrasher cousin flew off for parts unknown to chase his fortune as a fighter jockey a decade ago. Flask really should've anticipated this exact scenario when his cousin returned to town.

  The driftvault, the real driftvault, floats impatiently some dozen or so feet past the driftchiller named Penelope's left bumper, exactly preventing their clean escape and exactly fulfilling Two-Bit's three day old prophecy. The narrow loading dock now provides an easy bottleneck for anyone attempting to prevent the bankrobber's escape.

  Perhaps there was some mechanical prodigy working in the driftvault garage this morning. Perhaps the Nyvo grease monkey whose palm he'd greased to sabotage this very particular vehicle was struck with a bolt of conscience, incompetence or ditrogen this morning. Flask had no method of discerning which and truth be told, that wasn't the most immediate concern on his checklist at the moment.

  Flask is three seconds into a convincing enough pantomime that his comm unit is malfunctioning when his intended audience, the Karracki guard, fires.

  The shotgun's expelled round instantaneously informs Flask of two separate but not unrelated facts. The first fact is that his pantomime was evidently not as convincing as he might have guessed. The second fact is that, while Odisseus might have done a bang-up job with the cosmetic transformation, Penelope was, by no stretch of the imagination, actually an armored driftvault.

  Flask's driver's side door is crumpled. Flask's driver's side window is obliterated. Flask's driver's side arm is missing a considerable chunk of its flesh. Red smoke residue streams into the cab and the door dangles off the frame by one desperate hinge. The driftchiller suddenly appears to be a child's flimsy cardboard imitation of a driftvault, one supercharged shotgun round the only thing required to break the fragile facade.

  A distant ringing in his ears and profound shock currently replaces Flask's arm pain. In thanks, he flops sideways onto the bench seat, jerks his secreted pistol from its holster and fires a chorus of ill-aimed ammo through the toothy maw of the shattered window. If his desperate attempt at return fire makes any impact against the fortified foe, Flask has zero time to check. His shoulder-strapped comm is suddenly alive with an incoming transmission.

  “So, uh, how's that stalling coming?”

  Flask draws bloody fingers away from the nasty wound streaking a red line up his arm. “This is why I don't fookin' ride along!”

  “Could be mistaken on this one,” Nemo caveats with queer calm in his voice, “but, uh, pretty sure we heard something that sounds an awful lot like, well, gunfire.” A pregnant pause elapses. “You got shot, didn't you?” A second expelled shotgun round, this one whizzing millimeters past Penelope's viewport, answers Nemo's question for him. “I think Flask's somehow shot,” he offers as an aside.

  Barely audible through the comm, the bounty hunter's voice is laden thick with incredulity. “Who shot him?”

  “The fookin–”

  “Driftvault.” Flask snaps his head upward; Two-Bit's voice is unexpectedly present and devoid of the comm channel's static. He stands immediately above the prone Flask in his slate gray uniform, one gloved hand flat against Penelope's scratchy bench seat, staring, astounded, out towards their hovering, identical antagonist. “All the moons,” he breathes, turning suddenly down toward Flask. “You had one job, mate!”

  “Oh, get bloomed, you fooking jabberhead!” Flask snaps in return. “I had forty fooking jobs, didn't I? You're thinking of yourself, like, with your blooming fooking gravitons and all.”

  Appearing in his opposite fist, Two-Bit waggles his handheld graviton in Flask's face. “I'm the one who did his blooming job!”

  Flask waggles his blood-soaked sleeve emphatically towards the standing Two-Bit. “I'm the one they fooking shot!”

  Another canister, the third the Karracki gunman had the distinct pleasure of firing that morning, collides interruptively into Penelope's port side. A fashionable new dent, nearly a foot thick, appears in the side of her rear compartment. The entire vehicle is rocked hard enough to practically somersault Flask backward into the opposite door.

  Once he's righted himself, Flask lobs another batch of discouraging fire out the window to little visible or audible effect.

  “Cap'n,” Two-Bit barks, his comm clamped urgently to his mouth, “I'm vizzing at the nitty deal out here. We don't hoof and I mean crackling, Penelope here'll be taking the long fall to the floor, you delly me? Plus,” he adds, with the dirtiest of looks at Flask, “you gotta come joy, 'cause our regularly scheduled fucking joystick went and got himself cabbaged.”

  “We ain't exactly finished in here,” Nemo replies shakily. “Four or fives boxes to go.”

  With the tortured shriek of metal grinding metal, the valiant last hinge connecting the dangling door to the driftchiller's frame finally gives way. Its rivets pop free and the door itself bounces against the cab's floor a moment before tipping out of sight. As his only tenuous cover plummets away, Flask barely has enough time to scramble over the bench seat. He crashes into the stacked piles of strongboxes in Penelope's rear compartment. The shotgun fires a fourth time and the passenger side window sprays its glass against the bank's nearest wall.

  “Coming!” Nemo reports cheerfully.

  From his new vantage in the rear compartment, Flask catches a fleeting glimpse of the bank's interior, through Penelope's open loading doors. Nemo fans himself with his uniform's gray cap and trots amiably toward them. Quicksilver, their ruse blown, encourages browbeaten bank employees to load the remaining handful of strongboxes at pistol point. Nemo waves the hat as he boards, the driftmotor dipping slightly to accommodate his weight.

  “What seems to be the trouble, boys?” Nemo inquires, in the manner of a pediatrician.

  Two-Bit cranes as far over the bench seat as he dares to exchange fire with the distant driftvault. He shoots Nemo a sardonic look. “Have a vizz, why don'tcha?”

  In response, Nemo shrugs, tosses his hat aside and plants both hands on the top of the bench seat.

  “Wait, don't–” Flask attempts to warn him.

  With utter heedlessness, he hops over and settles himself into Penelope's driver's seat –in full, uninterrupted view of both the gun-port and its shotgun-wielding occupant. Nemo gives the floating driftvault one confused glance, cranes a look back over his shoulder towards Flask and calmly shifts Penelope into reverse. The shotgun manages to loose two shots and, any second, Flask anticipates seeing the contents of Nemo's head decorate the scratchy wool of the bench seat. Instead, one shot clatters into the vehicle's bumper and the other misses Penelope entirely, a seemingly impossible feat.

  As Nemo calmly repositions the driftchiller to allow them a
straight shot out of the loading dock, Flask catches eyes with Two-Bit a moment.

  “He still fookin' does that, eh?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Hey, so,” Nemo poses, his head and shoulder turned to accommodate Penelope's backward motion, “I guess I thought that driftvault, the one out there, was supposed to be knocked outta commission today?”

  “It was s'pposed to be,” Two-Bit's quick to condemn.

  “It was s'pposed to be,” Flask agrees virulently. “That little Nyvo gobshite what works in their garage gave me his fookin' word, up and down, like. I had everything all fookin' arranged, I did!”

  “Did you?” Nemo comments, almost uninterested. “I wasn't really paying attention.”

  In short order, Penelope is appropriately arranged, ready to jettison straight outward from the loading dock at a moment's notice. Nemo spends another moment counting strongboxes with extended fingers and inaudible muttering. The distant shotgun inexplicably unable to land a successfully damaging blow this whole time. Nemo, when satisfied, forgoes his comm to simply shout through the vehicle's rear compartment. “Moira!” he calls in the voice of an impatient parent. “We're leaving!”

  Seemingly without need of reply, Nemo rams the accelerator and Penelope, poor old girl that she is, sputters once, twice. On her third attempt, she motors unevenly forward, propelling away from the bank at any alarming rate. Flask stares, deeply confused, at the shrinking image of Quicksilver, attired in her stolen bank uniform, on the edge of the loading dock.

  His unworded question is immediately answered when, with six feet of running start, the bounty hunter bounds off the extreme end of the loading dock. She sails over the growing distance between bank and Penelope and comes to a crouched landing upon the latter. The resulting dip from the driftmotor is severe enough to flip even Flask's stomach.

  Rising from her crouch, Quicksilver returns a bloodless, deadpan version of Nemo's original “Coming!”

  The driftvault's barricade is circumvented by, of course, Nemo and his aerial acrobatics. Penelope tips nearly forty-five degrees on her axis and her driftmotor repulses the two craft apart. The contents of her rear compartment – namely Flask, Two-Bit, Quicksilver and twenty some crates of currency – are tossed about willy-nilly.

  To save himself from being crushed beneath hundreds of pounds of untraceable cash, Flask scrambles out of the rear compartment. While Two-Bit and Moira are still righting themselves, Flask plops down in the passenger seat, amid a spread of broken glass shards.

  “Oi!” Two-Bit protests, peeking into the front seat. “Who keeled and made you shotgun?”

  “'cause it's my fookin' caper, isn't it?” Flask shouts back, once again brandishing his wounded arm as evidence. “'cause my arm is fookin' shot, isn't it?”

  “Oh, bloom me out,” Two-Bit balks, “wouldja quit queeging 'bout that already? They scanty scraped you!”

  With Worldshine's scaffolds and starscrapers zooming past through the empty doorjamb, Nemo makes a placid gesture to indicate Flask. “I don't mind if Two-Bit sits up front.”

  “See?” Two-Bit proclaims petulantly.

  “I'm Flask,” Flask reminds Nemo gently, planting blood-stained fingers on his chest.

  Nemo stares absently at his cousin for too long a moment. “Of course you are.”

  Catching wise, Two-Bit's mouth gapes open, as though he's undecided somewhere between astonishment and offense. “Did you call him Two-Bit?” he demands, with an accusatory point towards Flask.

  “He did,” Flask agrees grimly. “He fooking did.”

  “Fellas.” Eyes forward, Nemo makes an excusing gesture with one hand, the other steering the driftchiller at top speed through steamy streets. “You're both dressed the same, you both have silly voices–”

  "Silly voices?” Flask scoffs, aghast. “It's you blowbags with the silly voices.” He returns Two-Bit's accusatory point. “He's a blooming jabberhead, by all the moons!”

  “Least I know how to pronounce the word 'fuck!'” Two-Bit spits.

  “Idiots?” The bounty hunter's voice comes as a sudden shock to all three occupants of Penelope's cab. She's somehow audible over the sounds of the open driftmotor, Gallow whipping past and all the name-calling and finger pointing. “Sorry to interrupt, but they're still following.”

  Peering back through the rear compartment reveals the oncoming driftvault, perfectly framed by the yawning portal of Penelope's loading bay door. It hangs a respectable enough distance behind to allow the occasional shotgun blast to veer dangerously close or even occasionally clip the driftchiller's edges with a spritz of sparks. Subtle shifts of Nemo's hands, intentional or not, adjusts Penelope's bearing such that the majority of the previously well-aimed bolts are denigrated to narrow misses.

  With each occasional hit, however, the whole vehicle lurches spasmodically. Each one forces Flask to reconsider his previous stance about simply stealing a driftvault. Had he known the caper would go south in quite this particular way, he would have opted for thicker armor over increased surreptitiousness.

  Standing with defiance practically in full view of the advancing driftvault, with only a smattering of unstowed strongboxes as meager cover, is Nemo's pet bounty hunter. Her splendid pair of silver revolvers shine in the sunlight. Her return fire, carefully placed and carefully timed, splashes weakly against the authentic diamond-smelted Niasi steel of that implacable driftvault. The viewport, Flask observes, is no more susceptible, deflecting and ricocheting supercharged ditrogen until kingdom come.

  Two-Bit matches his gaze. “The bloom? Thems is some plucky crushers,” he comments, not without a certain impression in his voice.

  “Sub-contract, this firm,” Flask reminds. “They lose a shipment, the losses come outta their end. Hence,” he splays his fingers condescendingly, “them still following.”

  “Whaddya think,” Nemo proposes, “shake 'em beneath?”

  “Worth a shot.”

  Without further preamble, Nemo cranks the steering yoke upward and Penelope plummets, her forward view of Worldshine's edifices replaced by the limitless fathoms below. A mere moment's descent brings the demarkation grate skyrocketing up to meet them. With a nauseating yank of the controls, Nemo twists Penelope to squeeze perfectly between one of the twenty-foot by twenty-foot thermosteel lattices.

  The ambient shift is both immediate and drastic – from generous lanes and monolithic heights to punishing alleyways and abyssal depths. Once again, they were skidding through the dusty, confused tangle of Underglow, Nemo at the wheel, Flask riding shotgun and with catwalks, clotheslines and all the other assembled impedimenta to falter the unaccustomed authorities in close pursuit behind. For his part, Flask's cousin could be ten years younger, exploiting his craft's superior maneuverability to help compensate for its easily damaged hull.

  For their part, the driftvault seems likewise immune, not just to Moira's projectiles, but to whatever obstacles Nemo attempts to intersperse between them. The opposing driver makes zero attempt to avoid any of them and chooses instead to simply plow, unharmed, through rotted fabric, broken chain link and rusted thermosteel alike.

  “Here's a flash,” Two-Bit shouts between blasts of his gripped Tigress. “How's about, 'stead of, I don't know, sittin' there winging your bloomhole off 'bout your meat wound, you tryta raise Abraham on the comm, get some blooming buzz support?”

  “Maybe I will,” Flask resolves, already reaching for the transceiver dangling off Penelope's dashboard and deciding better against sticking his tongue out at Two-Bit.

  This broadwave comm, the one Odisseus had scavenged from the junk halo, would've been ancient when the Imperium was young. It takes Flask a number of awkward moments fiddling with one good hand to dial the frequency for his trusty police scanner.

  “This don't bode well,” the weatherbeaten voice crackles through the inset speakers.

  “That you, old timer?” Flask addresses the static. “Do you copy?”

  “The only reason I
can speculate,” Abraham reasons, “that ye'd be callin' 'twould be if somethin' went wrong. Police scanner wrong.”

  Nemo pauses before suggesting conspiratorially, “This coulda been part of the plan.”

  “For the record,” Flask states, “it ain't.”

  “You got your equipment on hand?”

  “Aye?” Abraham confirms tentatively.

  “Need you to keep that one good eye of yours out.” Nemo is cavalier, unaffected by high speed pursuit or shotgun fire. “Chances are, we'll be drawing a modest amount of heat before too much longer here and we'd sure appreciate a heads-up.”

  “Where are ye?”

  “Uh–” Nemo's eyes dart about for a landmark, a nicety Flask, lifelong resident, need not bother with.

  “Cannery District. Ninth and Tymoko.”

  “So noted,” Abraham grimly reports. “Ye'll hear from us soon, I've little doubt.” Before Flask can ask what he means by “us,” he detects the muffled sound of several undecipherable Ortoki growls in the background of Abraham's feed. The channel hisses out.

  Metal wheezes, Penelope lists lurchingly left and Quicksilver's voice is raised in polite annoyance somewhere aft. “Nemo? Could you maybe do some of your ace pilot shit and stop flying in such a straight moons-damned line?” Pistol fire staccatos her request. “It's doing wonders for their aim.”

  “Fair enough.” As advertised, Nemo executes some ace piloting and weaves Penelope across a bisecting side street and down a parking shaft fast enough to dribble Flask's equilibrium against both sides of his skull. His ears battle mightily against popping and his eyes are accosted by an overwhelming cascade of lights. In all the parking shaft's confusion, Flask nearly misses the skidding scrape and the scarlet muzzle flash that signifies the driftvault's presence behind them.

  Gravity greatly aiding her speed, the driftchiller emerges from the parking shaft mere seconds after entering. A sharp tug of the yoke starts Penelope braiding through the maze of pillars that keeps the parking compound aloft.

  They're each columns of solid thermosteel, thick enough to crumple Penelope like a Bubble can upon collision. The pillars shuffle past the viewport at a disheartening speed, Nemo tapping bored thumbs against the yoke's leathern grips.